FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
Now that the GOP tax bill has exposed “deficit concerns” by congressional Republicans as an empty marketing ploy, will those in the media who pushed the Deficit Doom narrative during the early Obama years admit they were wrong?
The New York Times is again spreading the absurd myth that House Speaker Paul Ryan and other Republicans want a free market in healthcare.
Ruth Marcus used her Washington Post column today to present the speech that House Speaker Paul Ryan should give to Republicans in order to disassociate himself from Donald Trump. She has Paul Ryan being somewhat less than honest.
Ryan wants to change his public image, and is relying on media coverage to help him do that. The NewsHour’s Judy Woodruff was unsurprisingly doing her part.
Instead of stressing cuts to poverty programs as a way to balance the budget, Ryan was now pushing them as a way to tackle poverty. This, in the eyes of many news outlets, was a welcome shift toward “bipartisanship.”
Republican Congressman Paul Ryan is back with yet one more plan to fight poverty. And, as usual the national media are giving him plenty of attention. But is there anything new here? And what are the broad lessons—and problems—with the poverty discussions that Ryan inspires? We’ll ask poverty researcher and author Stephen Pimpare.
Also this week: Former CNN anchor Campbell Brown is making the media rounds with a new corporate education reform group that targets teachers as the problem with public schools. But like other such reformers, Brown has no background in education, and often gets her facts wrong. Michigan State University education professor Alyssa Hadley Dunn with join us with a fact-check.
Perhaps media aren’t driven to challenge Ryan’s bona fides as a “big-ideas guy” because they share those big ideas.
Paul Ryan says he wants to fight poverty, and he can convince reporters that he means it. But what about his actual record?
What if lawmakers put forward a federal budget plan to tax big financial institutions, enact a healthcare public option and increase spending to put millions of Americans to work on badly needed infrastructure projects? They did. You just didn’t read or hear much about it.
Paul Ryan apparently has some big, bold ideas about how to fight poverty–mostly what the government is doing is all wrong. But why does the Washington Post fail to cite any critics of Ryan, and spend so much time quoting him and other Republicans?
This week on FAIR TV: Obamacare is like Hurricane Katrina? No, says one pundit: It’s like Obama’s Iraq War. Also this week: The Washington Post does PR for Paul Ryan as a poverty fighter, and CNN responds to its unbalanced pro-nuclear documentary with…a pro-nuke panel discussion.
Let’s say you’re best known for coming up with a federal budget blueprint that slashed tax rates for the wealthy and proposed big cuts to anti-poverty safety net programs, but now you want to be known as a guy who really cares about fighting poverty. Lucky for you, the Washington Post is here to help.
Paul Ryan’s RNC convention speech kicked off a lot of discussion about how and when journalists should do factchecking. Some reporters noted that, for instance, the people you factcheck can push back; other pieces wondered if it was making any difference at all. There are plenty of factchecking operations, but there seems to be a […]
On the subject of why politicians aren’t worried about corporate media factcheckers, a New York Times article from last week (8/31/12) by Alessandra Stanley is worth a second look. Under the headline, “How MSNBC Became Fox‘s Liberal Evil Twin,” Stanley wrote: “You can agree with everything that Rachel Maddow or Ed Schultz say on MSNBC […]
“What if it turns out that when the press calls a lie a lie, nobody cares?” That’s the question asked by Atlantic editor-in-chief James Bennet (8/28/12) after a raft of Pinocchios and flaming pants failed to sway the Romney campaign from its position that “we’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by factcheckers.” […]
Flipping open the new issue of Time (9/3/12), a piece by Michael Crowley begins: Paul Ryan may be America’s most famous budget wonk. Oh good grief. Crowley’s point is not just to praise Ryan’s devotion to spreadsheets. No, this piece is about the influences that made Paul Ryan the wonk he is today: But he’s […]
Time magazine’s Michael Crowley, from the new issue: In naming Wisconsin Representative Paul Ryan as his running mate on August 11, Romney chose someone as deep as Palin was shallow, a studious wonk known for his mastery of that most substantive of all issues: the federal budget. For Crowley, this is actually toning down the […]
If you know anything of substance about Paul Ryan, it’s that the Republican vice presidential pick knows his numbers. A Washington Post profile today by Michael Leahy (8/20/12) tells us: He got his start on Capitol Hill as a 19-year-old intern working in the mailroom of Sen. Bob Kasten (R-Wis.). That led in time to […]
The Washington Post has done it again. Reporter Felicia Sonmez (8/17/12) somehow got a Republican campaign adviser to spill the beans on the Ryan/Romney relationship : A senior Republican adviser close to the campaign who spoke on the condition of anonymity said Ryan views Romney’s career as “a case study of some of the ideas […]
