FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
For media to imply that Voice of America or any other organizations under the US Agency for Global Media umbrella are virtuous and independent is categorically dishonest.
While more explicit admissions of deception on the part of US officials involved in wars are always appreciated, one question rarely discussed among the reports and opinion pieces praising the Afghanistan Papers is what this scoop says about the Washington Post.
An Atlantic essay’s main complaint about Chinese propaganda seems to be that Beijing is better at it than Washington.
In their efforts to refrain from using the negative—but accurate—term “coup” to describe events they support, the media have sometimes had to go to bizarre, roundabout and garbled lengths to dance around it.
It is virtually an iron law of journalism that descriptions of US government-friendly groups will be designed to signal readers that they deserve support.
The US government and its allies are effectively using the platform to silence dissenting opinion, both at home and on the world stage, controlling what Facebook‘s 2 billion users see and do not see.
That these two US government creations, along with a NATO offshoot like the Atlantic Council, are used by Facebook to distinguish real from fake news is effectively state censorship.
“Over a period of time, it became clear to most working journalists, especially in Washington, that their careers were not well-served by trying to maintain the high standards of journalism—that is, really seeking the truth, questioning those in power and those trying to sell them these lines—it became easier to go along with it.”
“One could argue that independent media is more powerful today, progressive independent media, than it was during the height of the New Left in the late ’60s and ’70s.”
Some perspective on the impact of Trump’s decision to “recognize” Jerusalem as the capital of Israel–apart from what it means for “Trump on the World Stage,”
Seemingly out of nowhere, North Korea became the top news story at the beginning of April. Tensions between the United States and North Korea were on the rise after new supreme leader Kim Jong Un conducted several missile and weapons tests, beginning at the end of 2012. The threats, bluster and provocations that followed led […]
Venezuela’s left-wing populist President Hugo Chávez died on Tuesday, March 5, after a two-year battle with cancer. If world leaders were judged by the sheer volume of corporate media vitriol and misinformation about their policies, Chávez would be in a class of his own. Shortly after Chávez won his first election in 1998, the U.S. […]
Withholding important news over supposed national security concerns is nothing new. And in many cases, no official request is even needed—the decision-makers seem to have internalized the notion that keeping the government’s secrets is part of their job.
Issues like oil spills, land use rights, groundwater pollution etc. are all complaints made by critics of the Keystone XL pipeline. And looming over all of them is the way that tapping the tar sands will exacerbate climate change. But the media doesn’t seem to care.
It’s a fair indication of the current state of play in U.S. media that, in 2012, TV newscasts were acknowledged to be “increasingly seeded with corporate advertising masquerading as news” (Washington Post, 1/3/12)—and the regulatory response was to call, not for an end to the practice of deceiving audiences, but for broadcasters to make note […]
Anonymous government sources speaking to the New York Times, along with intelligence based on satellite imagery, tell a frightening story: The brutal leader of an unfriendly Arab country is preparing to unleash chemical weapons. Sound familiar? There are significant differences between the allegations about Syria’s WMDs today and Iraq’s nonexistent weapons in 2003. But the […]
Amnesty International (10/1/12) describes it as a nation where ruling party officials have “abused public institutions and administrative re-sources to restrict the freedom of assembly, expression and association of opposition supporters,” many of whom have been “fined, fired, harassed or detained.” Free speech advocates condemned its president for shuttering an opposition TV station for alleged […]
“Hyperbole is the currency of presidential campaigns, but this year the nation’s future truly hangs in the balance,” warned the New York Times editorial board in October 2008 (10/23/08). In endorsing presidential candidate Barack Obama over John McCain, the Times stressed that the differences between the two candidates were “profound.” On issues related to the […]
If you’re covering Latin America for U.S. corporate media, Michael Shifter is the person to turn to when you need a quote. Currently the president of the Inter-American Dialogue research group, Shifter offers soothing centrism about political developments across the region—giving reporters soundbites on everything from a papal visit to Cuba to elections in Argentina […]
The news that a U.S. Army sergeant killed 16 civilians, most of them children, in southern Afghanistan early Sunday morning was treated by many media outlets primarily as a PR challenge for continued war and occupation of that country. “Afghanistan, once the must-fight war for America, is becoming a public relations headache for the nation’s […]
