FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
In his New York Times column, David Brooks cheers the rise of suburban independent voters in this week’s midterms elections, crediting them with Republican victories in New Jersey and Virginia. Brooks has made a career out of singing the praises of suburban Americans, all the while suggesting that they are somewhat ignored. While liberals and […]
The Washington Post reported (11/5/09) that some Democrats are “questioning whether they should emphasize job creation over some of the more ambitious items on the president’s agenda.” A couple paragraphs later, reporters Michael Shear and Paul Kane elaborate: Moderate and conservative Democrats took a clear signal from Tuesday’s voting, warning that the results prove that […]
Under the headline “Va., N.J. Give GOP Reason to Celebrate,” USA Today‘s front-page election report (11/4/09) featured this quote from GOP strategist Frank Donatelli: The warning is that if you’re in a moderate district, or you’re in a moderate-to-conservative state, you should think twice before you rubberstamp Obama’s agenda. Well, there were two districts choosing […]
In this week’s cover story, Newsweek‘s Sharon Begley seems to think Al Gore’s new book is good–but he’s still too wonky: To anyone with bad memories of how Gore’s fact-filled debate performances against George W. Bush in 2000 failed to connect with voters, it may come as no surprise that Our Choice has a graphic […]
The White House’s beef with Fox News Channel continues, as do the right-wing cable channel’s bizarre attempts to defend their journalistic integrity. Take this example from today’s New York Times (10/22/09). Obviously the White House is most offended by the likes of Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck; this is unfair, according to Fox: But Michael […]
Following the 1992 GOP convention, FAIR’s magazine Extra! (11/92) highlighted remarks made by Rich Bond in which the then-Republican national chair explained the strategy behind the right’s relentless charges of liberal media bias: There’s some strategy to it. I’m the coach of a kids’ basketball team and Little League Teams. If you watch any great […]
Politico (10/14/09) published a list of top topics on Glenn Beck’s Fox News show, based on a search of Nexis transcripts since the show’s January 2009 debut. It’s instructive to look at the placement of some individuals, groups and places in the news as an indication of Beck’s sense of whom and what his audience […]
If you want a lesson in how right-wing pressure on corporate media works, look no further than the ACORN story. Right-wing talkshow hosts have targeted the community organizing group for years, primarily on charges of vote fraud. Then two conservative activists produced some embarrassing videos of ACORN workers at some local offices giving tax advice […]
William Bennett at the Values Voter Summit (AlterNet, 9/22/09): I don’t know why more of the African American leadership doesn’t talk about Frederick Douglass…. Probably because of his deep devotion to Lincoln, and his deep devotion to this country. Frederick Douglass at the dedication of the Freedman’s Monument in Memory of Abraham Lincoln (4/14/1876): It […]
We’ve talked about these “Topic A” debates in the Washington Post before, and today’s installment is a doozy. The topic on the table is Obama’s media strategy. And, as before, the important people are on the political right, Here are the right-wingers: Karl Rove, Dan Schnur(communications director of John McCain’s 2000 presidential campaign), Ed Rogers […]
While within the power-friendly environs of the corporate-funded Newseum, congressmembers John D. Rockefeller IV, Tim Pawlenty and Mary L. Landrieu probably felt pretty good about their ability to field such softballs from ABC‘s George Stephanopoulos as “What’s the problem with the public health option?” But upon leaving corporate TV’s criticism-free zone, where such lies as […]
Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz (9/14/09) writes of the Van Jones controversy, in which Fox News‘ Glenn Beck took credit for the resignation of a White House staffer: In the Jones case, there is little question that the traditional media botched the story of an Obama administration official who, wittingly or otherwise, lent his […]
“It is difficult to overstate President Obama’s unpopularity in most of Louisiana,” writes Campbell Robertson in a front-page New York Times article (9/11/09). Yet Robertson managed to pull it off. Robertson continues: “He lost handily to Senator John McCain here, picking up only 14 percent of the white vote. (The state is roughly two-thirds white.)” […]
Mark Howard of News Corpse (9/3/09) has a look at a September 2 Fox News “sermon” in which Glenn Beck “has used his divine vision to reveal the evidence of Satan’s secret seeds” in the form of “paintings and sculptures and other works by historyâ┚¬Ã¢”ž¢s subversives–the artists!” As Beck “associates the evil artists with their […]
One of the items enumerated in Glenn Greenwald’s round-up of “Various Matters” for Salon (9/4/09, ad-viewing required) addresses how NBC‘s “Chuck Todd this week noted the series of petty scandals the right has been manufacturing and remarked: ‘The ability of some conservatives to create media firestorms is still much greater than liberals these days’”–which viewpoint […]
What “surprises” Los Angeles Times columnist Michael Hiltzik (8/30/09) more than this summer’s news full of “baroque conspiracy theories” and “weepy hysteria” is “the idea that these are somehow unprecedented.” Hiltzik looks back to an earlier era of supposed presidential “socialism” in the U.S. to see such current claims as “merely the latest examples of […]
Having on its debut dethroned Glenn Beck from Amazon’s bestseller rankings to become “the No. 1 nonfiction book in all categories,” David Swanson’s Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union title looks to “how we can reform the systemic weaknesses in our representative government that deny us healthcare and many other […]
Guernica magazine has a new piece by American Prospect co-founder Robert Reich (8/28/09) describing the important cog that corporate journalism represents in the functioning machinery of Washington, D.C.’s “echo chamber in which anyone who sounds authoritative repeats the conventional authoritative wisdom about the ‘consensus’ of inside opinion,” which they’ve heard from someone else who sounds […]
Somehow the Drudge-friendly news site Politico managed to write an entire piece today about pressure on the White House from anti-war left (“W.H. Fears Liberal War Pressure”) without actually quoting anyone who might apply that pressure. Reporter Mike Allen did gather thoughts from Matt Bennett of the Third Way think tank (a self-consciously centrist group […]
Eva Paterson (Huffington Post, 8/28/09), president and founder of the Equal Justice Society, has a response to Glenn Beck’s assertion that “I want to point out the silence; no one has challenged these facts” after having been “smearing White House special advisor Van Jones for days on his show.” Being “the person who first hired […]
