FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
A CounterSpin special broadcast about Gary Webb’s reporting featured excerpts from a talk by Webb, along with an interview with Norman Solomon discussing inaccuracies and distortions in establishment media attacks on Webb.
When the Washington Post’s David Ignatius writes a column headlined “Putin Steals the CIA’s Playbook on Anti-Soviet Covert Operations,” is that supposed to be a criticism or a compliment?
‘How Short Our Memory Is’ Looking back at the 10th anniversary of the Iraq invasion, MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough (Morning Joe, 3/19/13) scorned media outlets and others who failed to acknowledge their responsibility for leading the country into war: “The very same people who spent years beating up George Bush were the very ones beating the […]
The New York Times’ Michael Shear suggests that Rep. Rand Paul’s criticism of Obama’s drone attacks are nothing out of the ordinary–but he takes a strange trip down memory lane to make the case.
CNN/Time pundit Fareed Zakaria is considered one of the smartest guys in elite policy/media circles.Speaking with CNN host Anderson Cooper on Friday(3/4/11), he advocated CIA intervention in Libya. Deriding a no-fly zone as something less than a “magic solution,” he explained: ZAKARIA: There’s a lot of covert stuff we can do. We can effectively fund […]
Kudos to the New York Times for publishing a front-page article (10/8/09) about the U.S. advisers and lobbyists who have been working (in one form or another) on behalf of the coup government in Honduras. But the piece glosses over the U.S. history in the region. Reporters Ginger Thompson and Ron Nixon write that the […]
In a Consortium News rejoinder (4/30/09) to how “mainstream U.S. news media often laments the decline of objective journalism, pointing disapprovingly at the more subjective news that comes from the Internet or from ideological programming,” Robert Parry writes that one could argue that the U.S. mainstream press has inflicted the severest damage to the concept […]
The Washington Post editorial yesterday on Nicaragua begins: Through much of the 1980s, the United States waged a proxy war to prevent Daniel Ortega and his Sandinista party from consolidating a dictatorship in Nicaragua. In 1990, Mr. Ortega finally agreed to hold a presidential election, which he lost…. That history is false. Nicaragua held a […]
As the Bush administration carries out what the New York Times (4/5/05) describes as a “concerted effort” to block the return of the left-wing Sandinista party to power in Nicaragua, U.S. media are returning to the kind of distorted reporting on Nicaragua that characterized coverage during Washington’s war against that country in the 1980s. The […]
News stories about George W. Bush’s appointment of numerous Iran-Contra veterans to key posts have largely relied on past reporting and he-said, she-said soundbites rather than in-depth investigations into their complicity in one of the bloodiest scandals of the past 20 years.
Not everyone was unprepared for the Nicaraguan election results. In his 1985 book Turning the Tide, Noam Chomsky predicted that the US would not overthrow the Sandinistas through an invasion as long as “the dream that there might be a more just and decent society remains.” “A wiser strategy,” Chomsky wrote, is first to kill […]
During the height of the civil rights movement, Southern authorities frequently reacted to the bombing of a black church or a civil rights leader’s home by blaming the act on the Movement: “The Negroes did it themselves. It’s a stunt to win sympathy.” While the innuendo that Martin Luther King, Jr. would have fire-bombed his […]
Although rigged elections during the Somoza era raised hardly an eyebrow in Washington, Nicaragua’s November 1984 election was pilloried by the White House and the mainstream media. Pre-election reporting was hostile, coverage of the actual balloting was hijacked by hysteria over phantom Soviet MIG jets in Nicaragua, and a few months later many journalists seemed […]
Since 1985, reports linking Contra arms suppliers to cocaine smuggling have run in progressive publications and a few mainstream outlets. But CBS West 57th’s well-documented segment on the CIA/Contra drug connection (4/6/87) was the first serious network probe.
