FAIRNESS & ACCURACY IN REPORTING

Challenging media bias since 1986.

FAIR

FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.

Challenging media bias since 1986
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Articles about: Poverty/Welfare
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December 18, 2009
Michelle Chen on Copenhagen, Joe Conason on ACORN videos

Michelle Chen on Copenhagen, Joe Conason on ACORN videos

[mp3-jplayer tracks=”CounterSpin121809 Michelle Chen and Joe Conason @https://eadn-wc04-3257648.nxedge.io/audio/counterspin/CounterSpin121809.mp3″] Download MP3 This week on CounterSpin: Walkouts and protests at the Copenhagen summit have highlighted the political friction in responding to climate change. But is the press corps that brings us headlines like the New York Times‘ “Poor and Emerging States Stall Climate Negotiations” the right place […]

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October 2, 2009
Gareth Porter on Iran, Christopher Martin on ACORN

Gareth Porter on Iran, Christopher Martin on ACORN

Download MP3 This week on CounterSpin: This week on CounterSpin, did the White House really disclose the existence of Iran’s new Uranium enrichment plant, and does the plant, as many news stories seem to indicate, really violate the law? And what evidence is there that the new plant may have anything to do with a […]

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September 4, 2009
Jordan Flaherty on Katrina anniversary, Sarah Anderson on executive pay

Jordan Flaherty on Katrina anniversary, Sarah Anderson on executive pay

Download MP3 This week on CounterSpin: Corporate media promised to pay more attention to poverty and race after the Gulf Coast’s Katrina disasters in 2005, and for a short time they did a little more reporting. But where was the followup on this year’s August anniversary, when papers like the Washington Post and L.A. Times, […]

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April 24, 2009
Glenn Greenwald on torture, Rose Aguilar on tent cities

Glenn Greenwald on torture, Rose Aguilar on tent cities

Download MP3 This week on CounterSpin: While it’s pretty clear that Bush-era torture occurred, and that U.S. and international treaties oblige the U.S. to investigate, the hot media discussion centers not on when investigations will begin, but on whether President Barack Obama—not the Justice Department—thinks they should go forward. We’ll talk to Glenn Greenwald of […]

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March 17, 2009

‘Neo-Suffering of the Nouveau Poor’ Is Big News

Noting how “media have been pelting us with heart-wrenching stories about the neo-suffering of the Nouveau Poor”–“Sales of Gulfstream jets declining!”–Barbara Ehrenreich pretends (Barbara’s Blog, 3/12/09) to be “tempted to delete ‘class inequality’ from my worry list” before doing some actual reporting: But hard times are no more likely to abolish class inequality than Obama’s […]

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March 16, 2009

Will Media Compassion ‘Trickle-Down’ to All Poor People?

Hoping for “a trickle-down of a different sort, of compassion,” media writer Edward Wasserman gives his personal take (Miami Herald, 3/16/09) on resurgent media interest in (some) impoverished Americans: My own sense is that, in general, coverage of the poor has been so bad for so long that if indeed there is growing interest in […]

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February 1, 2009

The Recession and the “Deserving Poor”

As the economy crumbles, issues of poverty and economic need have begun to make more frequent appearances in the news media. From October through December 2008, for example, the three nightly TV news shows ran 20 stories—about one every four or five days—addressing poverty or related issues such as homelessness or food stamps. A previous […]

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October 23, 2007

USA Today’s SCHIP Favor

The White House veto of a Congressional plan to expand the SCHIP children’s health care program seemed to run against public opinion, which squarely supports the measure. But USA Today conducted a misleading poll that assisted the Bush administration’s efforts to portray the veto as an effort to help poor children. On October 16, the […]

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September 1, 2007
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The Poor Will Always Be With Us—Just Not on the TV News

The PDF version of the study is available here. According to the most recent U.S. Census Bureau data, 37 million Americans—one in eight—lived below the federal poverty line in 2005, defined as an annual income of $19,971 for a family of four. Yet poverty touches a far greater share of the population over the course […]

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August 27, 2007

FAIR SURVEY

When Hurricane Katrina devastated poor communities in New Orleans two years ago today, the media pledged to pay attention to the plight of the poor. Can you guess how newsworthy the major TV networks thought poverty was the year Katrina hit, compared to, say, the legal ordeals of millionaire pop star Michael Jackson? Or which […]

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January 5, 2007
Best of CounterSpin 2006

Best of CounterSpin 2006

On this special Best of CounterSpin, program we look back over some of what was news for the mainstream media in 2006—and some of what wasn’t news, but should’ve been.

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December 1, 2006

The Smell of Success

In August, the federal Temporary Assistance to Needy Families program—popularly known as “welfare reform”—turned 10 years old, sparking a rash of articles looking back on how the new law’s emphasis on time limits and “work activities” requirements has fared. But even with recent figures showing poverty on the rise, by and large news media treated […]

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November 1, 2006

Wrong Numbers

One charge that U.S. media have hurled at Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez—that poverty has worsened under his administration—seems tailored to alienate the populist leader from his natural supporters. Isn’t Chávez a leftist? Aren’t his policies pro-poor? progressives may wonder. What about all that oil wealth? Is this really true? No, it’s not. But that doesn’t […]

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September 1, 2006
Sue Sturgis on Katrina anniversary, Heather Boushey on welfare ‘reform’

Sue Sturgis on Katrina anniversary, Heather Boushey on welfare ‘reform’

It has been one year since Hurricane Katrina. . . What’s happened on the Gulf Coast since all the cameras and TV anchors cleared away? Also this week: Another media anniversary, ten years since the passage of the so-called welfare reform. Heather Boushey of the Center for Economic and Policy Research joins to discuss what’s missing from the media’s glowing assessment of this law’s success.

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June 1, 2005

Fuzzy Math

The Washington Post headline on March 18 seemed straightforward enough: “Senate Rejects GOP Budget Cuts; House Deficit-Reduction Moves Thwarted.” The U.S. Senate, in passing its budget bill the previous afternoon, had, reported Post writer Jonathan Weisman (3/18/05), “dealt a slap to President Bush and the Republican leadership, approving a 2006 budget that would gut much […]

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January 1, 2003

‘Making the Invisible Visible’

“We’d like to thank the mainstream media for showing up,” quipped Cheri Honkala, adjusting her baby son on her jeans-clad lap. The executive director of the Philadelphia-based Kensington Welfare Rights Union, a multiracial organization of, by and for poor and homeless people, Honkala was opening a Saturday press conference last October in a claustrophobic classroom […]

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May 1, 2002

Declaring Victory in the Welfare Debate

Ever since President Bill Clinton’s 1997 declaration that “we know now that welfare reform works,” media coverage of the issue has been haunted by the question of just what “working” means. Passed amid rhetoric of saving poor families from poverty, but with a preamble explicitly pushing a Gingrichian agenda of mar­riage and abstinence, the Personal […]

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May 1, 2002

The ‘Oh Really?’ Factor

If it’s “spin” to back up your arguments with bogus facts and statistics, and to dismiss numbers that don’t fit in with your preconceptions, then Bill O’Reilly‘s Fox News Channel show isn’t, as he repeatedly claims, a “no-spin zone”—it’s Spin City. During an interview with National Organization for Women president Kim Gandy (O’Reilly Factor, 2/5/02), […]

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