FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
Sam Dillon’s New York Times piece (12/14/08) is much better than most of the coverage of President-elect Barack Obama’s search for an Education secretary nominee. It’s even got some on-target media criticism: Editorials and opinion articles in the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times have described the debate as pitting […]
With Bob Kerrey back in the news (New York Times, 12/11/08) as the faculty of the New School University that he heads gives him a vote of no confidence, it’s worth recalling the kid-glove treatment given to him by most of the media when his involvement in Vietnam-era war crimes was revealed (Extra!, 7–8/01). Oddly, […]
Today New York Times business columnist David Leonhardt (12/10/08) weighs in on the $73-an-hour autoworker. His verdict is somewhat mixed–the Big Three do have to pay the so-called legacy costs that are part of this calculation, but it’s misleading to conflate that with current earnings of autoworkers: So what is the reality behind the number? […]
There are two problems with William Glabersonâ┚¬Ã¢”ž¢s New York Times News Analysis piece (12/10/08), ‘Relatives of 9/11 Victims Add a Passionate Layer to Guantanamo Debate.” Let’s start with the lead: After the detainees charged with the plotting of the September 11 attacks discussed confessing this week, something unusual was heard here: a vigorous public defense […]
Actual headline today (12/10/08) in the New York Times Dining section: Great Meals for Two, Under $100 (It’s Possible) Times food writer Frank Bruni stressed that it “was an experiment for lean times, but not an exercise in cheap eats.” In case there was any doubt. Looking back in the FAIR archives, one recalls that […]
There was an Editorial Observer piece in the New York Times today (12/4/08) that really read like a piece from the segregated South of the 1950s, taking the side of the Jim Crow-enforcing sheriff against the outside agitators. The piece described an event at a church in Patchogue, N.Y., that encouraged immigrants to talk about […]
The New York Times yesterday (12/3/08) described problems that President-elect Barack Obama faces in managing the transition at the Central Intelligence Agency. CJR‘s website has an item today (12/4/08) critical of the piece as a “dramatic example” of the Times‘ slanting its intelligence reporting toward sources who “don’t think that anyone who formulated or acquiesced […]
Two weekends ago the New York Times‘ Week In Review section launched an op-ed series called “Transitions,” in which it promised to provide “a series of Op-Ed articles by experts on the most formidable issues facing the new president.” The first installment (11/23/08), on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, featured seven op-eds. FAIR’s Peter […]
Is the total frenzy over post-Thanksgiving shopping a recent creation? That’s what David Carr writes in the New York Times today: Media and retail outfits are economic peas in a pod. Part of the reason that the Thanksgiving newspaper and local morning television show are stuffed with soft features about shopping frenzies is that they […]
Anyone who followed the results of Venezuela’s regional elections last Sunday will know that President Hugo Chavez’s party won 17 out of 22 contests up for grabs, garnering 52.5 percent of the popular vote to the opposition’s 41.1 percent. Unless, that is, they were relying on New York Times Latin America correspondent Simon Romero. Despite […]
Here’s the New York Times (11/24/08), reporting the Citigroup bailout: In tense, round-the-clock negotiations that stretched until almost midnight on Sunday, it became clear that the crisis of confidence had to be defused now or the financial markets could plunge further. Note the absence of any source here–that’s reporter Eric Dash, with the authority of […]
The New York Times‘ Week in Review section yesterday (11/23/08) gathered a group of op-eds under the heading “Transitions,” which they described as “a series of Op-Ed articles by experts on the most formidable issues facing the new president.” The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were the topics under examination; we’ve examined who gets to […]
In “Clout Has Plunged for Automakers and Union, Too,” the New York Times‘ Micheline Maynard makes this curious observation: [GM CEO Rick ]Wagoner and Ron Gettelfinger, head of the UAW, appeared on local TV in Detroit this week, but no Detroit representatives landed spots on the Sunday morning talk shows out of Washington. Senator Levin […]
The New York Times‘ Jonathan Hicks (11/17/08), writing about newly elected Staten Island Rep. Michael McMahon: Mr. McMahon…stresses his working-class roots, telling voters of his Irish fatherâ┚¬Ã¢”ž¢s lifelong job as an insurance underwriter. That must be the same working class that Bill O’Reilly comes from.
The “media bias” against Sarah Palin is a key ingredient of the conservative victimology of 2008, even though when you see negative reports about Palin these days, they’re generally sourced to her erstwhile Republican colleagues—and corporate media sometimes go to absurd lengths to give the attacks a semi-positive spin, as in this Alessandra Stanley piece […]
You see some absurd standards being set for how far President-elect Barack Obama should tip his cabinet to the right. Al Kamen in the Washington Post (11/7/07) writes that if “he’s serious about this bipartisan thing…then he’s going to have to do better than his predecessors, probably putting at least three non-D’s in the cabinet […]
As FAIR’s magazine Extra! has noted (9-10/08, 11-12/07), it’s often hard to tell from reading the U.S. press that polls have consistently shown a clear majority of Iraqis favor a withdrawal of American troops from their country. Today the New York Times published two articles offering Iraqi perspectives on the significance of Obama’s electoral victory. […]
The New York Times‘ Carol Giacomo promises (11/3/08) to “certainly be a lot more skeptical” in covering the arguments for war with Iran than she was when she covered the march to war with Iraq as a diplomatic correspondent for Reuters. That’s good to hear, but this passage in her column made me skeptical about […]
New York Times TV reporter Jim Rutenberg (11/2/08) tries to make a case that Fox News and MSNBC are (in Tom Rosenstiel’s words) “reverse images of each other.” Here are the actual quotes used by Rutenberg to demonstrate this supposed parallelism—first, Ann Coulter on Fox (10/30/08): I feel like we are talking to the Germans […]
In Michael Powell’s piece in the New York Times (10/22/08) on Barack Obama “changing his tempo,” I found this passage to be a little creepy: Mr. [Jim] Webb, a red-haired, proudly Scots-Irish pol with a John Wayne cadence, introduced Mr. Obama in Roanoke and began: He’s one of you. Mr. Webb offered a complicated formula […]
