FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
In 1996, journalist Gary Webb wrote a series of articles that forced a long-overdue investigation of a very dark chapter of recent U.S. foreign policy—the Reagan/Bush administration’s protection of cocaine traffickers who operated under the cover of the Nicaraguan Contra war in the 1980s. For his brave reporting at the San Jose Mercury News, Webb […]
Richard Kogan on the new Bush fiscal policy, which slashes spending on foot stamps, low-income childcare, and the like. Also: viewers have long suspected that television networks embrace a double standard when it comes to what ads they accept or reject. Now one group is calling for networks to clarify their policy once and for all.
The Los Angeles Times revealed last year (12/1/04) that the U.S. military lied to CNN in the course of executing psychological warfare operations, or PSYOPS, in advance of the November attack on Fallujah. In an October 14 on-air interview, Marine Lt. Lyle Gilbert told CNN Pentagon reporter Jamie McIntyre that a U.S. military assault on […]
When the New York Times reported on Monday (10/25/04) that over 300 tons of high-explosive materials appeared to be missing from an Iraqi weapons facility, it was no surprise that the Bush administration and conservative pundits would quickly challenge the story. But recent reporting has taken this spin as proof that the facts of the […]
In an outrageous politicization of journalism, CBS announced it would not air a report on forged documents that the Bush administration used to sell the Iraq war until after the November 2 election (New York Times , 9/25/04). A network spokesperson issued a statement declaring, “We now believe it would be inappropriate to air the […]
News Zero: The New York Times and the Bomb By Beverly Ann Deepe Keever Common Courage Press Reviewed by Karl Grossman The New York Times has for decades downplayed—indeed suppressed—the dangers of radioactivity, according to an exhaustive study by a professor of journalism at the University of Hawaii. Beverly Ann Deepe Keever is a former […]
FAIR, the national media watch group, encourages the reporters and news outlets who have been asked to reveal their sources in the Valerie Plame and Wen Ho Lee cases to cooperate with investigators. Protecting the identities of confidential sources is a journalistic right that should be recognized by the courts, but only when it protects […]
The July 3 L.A. Times finally put to some sort of definitive rest the notion that it was ebullient Iraqis who pulled down the Saddam Hussein statue in Baghdad’s Firdos Square in April of last year. The statue pulldown is described in an internal Army study, the Times reported, as one of many psychological operations […]
June 22, 2004 The Bush administration’s long-running attempts to link Iraq and Al Qaeda were dealt a serious blow when the September 11 commission’s June 16 interim report indicated that there did not appear to be a “collaborative relationship” between Iraq and Osama bin Laden, and that there was no evidence that Iraq was involved […]
Newsday columnist Jim Pinkerton discusses former counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke. And retired CIA official Melvin Goodman examines what’s lacking from coverage on the September 11 Commission’s initial reports.
Martin Bright of the Observer on American reporting on Iraq. Also: former 60 Minutes producer Barry Lando on the New York Times and misinformation.
Did the Bush administration portray Iraq as an imminent threat in order to justify an invasion? According to the White House, that’s a media hoax. “I think some in the media have chosen to use the word ‘imminent,’” White House press secretary Scott McClellan told reporters (1/27/04). “Those were not words we used.” With this […]
Investigative journalist Robert Dreyfuss shares about his recent Mother Jones article, The Lie Factory, which details how faulty information has shaped much of the Bush administration’s case for war in Iraq. Also this week: are new reports giving us enough background information about what has prompted the current crisis in Haiti?
Despite criticism of the media by the Bush administration and its allies, U.S. TV news coverage of the Iraq situation continues to be dominated by government and military officials, according to a new study by FAIR. The few critics of military operations that find themselves on the nightly news broadcasts rarely question the war as […]
The funny thing about the Weekly Standard’s “exposé” purporting to offer proof of a longstanding Iraq/al-Qaeda alliance (11/24/03) is the aura of tight-lipped secrecy the magazine tries to impute to the Bush administration’s case against Saddam Hussein. As everyone knows, hardline officials have spent the last two years leaking stories, writing op-eds, holding private briefings […]
One thing editors of the New York Times and I keep trying to do is knock down the notion that the Times is a liberal paper. But we go at it differently. They do it by stuff like calling the Nazi groper Schwarzenegger a moderate Republican (10/11/03), by apologizing for implying that George W. Bush […]
In the wars of the 1980s and ’90s, military planners placed considerable emphasis on controlling the information that reached the American public. Journalists were excluded from the wars in Grenada and Panama until the fighting was already concluded. This in turn led to complaints from journalists, and in the 1990 war in Iraq, code-named Operation […]
Scott Ritter, the former United Nations weapons inspector, spent the last several years telling anyone who would listen that Iraq probably did not possess any significant quantities of banned weapons. We now know that Ritter was most likely correct; U.S. forces occupying Iraq since late March have failed to find any weapons of mass destruction. […]
By the time the war against Iraq began, much of the media had been conditioned to believe, almost as an article of faith, that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was bulging with chemical and biological weapons, despite years of United Nations inspections. Reporters dispensed with the formality of applying modifiers like “alleged” or “suspected” to Iraq’s supposed […]
In two separate incidents last week, dozens of Iraqis were killed by what eyewitness survivors claim were U.S. airstrikes. U.S. officials, however, offered a range of denials and evasions about what may have caused the explosions. Despite evidence uncovered by one British newspaper about the second (and more deadly) of the incidents, however, most U.S. […]
