FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
When the Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation (MDRC) issued a report in May on an experimental Minnesota welfare program, showing that it had cut poverty levels, increased marriage rates and reduced domestic violence, newspaper editorialists and columnists were quick to proclaim this a sign of the success of welfare reform. Only one problem: The Minnesota project, […]
As a poverty specialist for the conservative Heritage Foundation, Robert Rector is one of the right-wing media machine’s most prolific pundits. In 1996, the year of the welfare reform debate, he was cited in media outlets an average of more than 15 times a month. Rector also feeds a vast network of right-wing talkshow hosts […]
If a newspaper has a political agenda, presumably it would be most visible on its editorial page. Examination of editorials in some of the most prominent dailies—the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times and USA Today—on a range of economic and social issues shows that they tend to articulate the same […]
Note: This article is a sidebar to “Media Moguls on Board: Murdoch, Malone and the Cato Institute“ In 1995, during the national debate over welfare reform, the Cato Institute released a study called “The Work Vs. Welfare Trade-Off.” The report was packed with statistics culled from Cato’s research: “In 40 states welfare pays more than […]
One man’s prison rape story doesn’t come close to filling this kind of vacuum and mis-reporting in the newspaper of record. “Newspapers in New York could have a full time corrections reporter, there’s so much out there,” says Gary Craig. Not a bad idea.
Reporters who covered the funeral of Britain’s Princess Diana were mystified by the mourners (e.g., New York Times, 9/7/97). “Why are you here?” one journalist after another asked the people adding bouquets to the mountainous flower pile outside the palace gates. Sikhs and Rastafarians, Londoners and tourists, women and men, gay and straight, responded in […]
When Extra! reviewed welfare coverage in 1995 (5-6/95), it was easy to pick out the popular media themes. What passed for debate sounded more like a chorus–exaggerating the burden of welfare programs on the federal budget and scapegoating the poor, the black, the foreign, the female and the young. Relatively powerless groups became the targets […]
For the past four years, the debate about “welfare” has targeted women. Politicians fingered poor women as the main source of the nation’s problems, and reporters followed, creating vivid, misleading images of lazy mothers-of-dozens draining to the dregs the nation’s coffers. The pictures skewed the facts, inflating the proportion of AFDC receivers who are African-American, […]
1. Poor women have more children because of the “financial incentives” of welfare benefits. Repeated studies show no correlation between benefit levels and women’s choice to have children. (See, for example, Urban Institute Policy and Research Report, Fall/93.) States providing relatively higher benefits do not show higher birth rates among recipients. In any case, welfare […]
In a bizarre column blaming TV talkshows, in part, for the “sexually irresponsible culture of poverty,” Newsweek‘s Joe Klein (2/6/95) provided telling insight into how some in mainstream media see their relationship to poor people: “Television is the only sustained communication our society has with the underclass,” Klein wrote. “It is the most powerful […]
“PrimeTime goes undercover to investigate welfare fraud, and the mess of a system that entices people to break the rules and gouge the taxpayers,” Diane Sawyer announced last year, introducing a segment of ABC‘s PrimeTime Live (9/17/92). “With so much money up for grabs,” Sawyer declared, “investigators in the field say it’s even better than […]
New York City’s shelter system for homeless families has become so livable that hundreds, if not thousands, of families who could stay elsewhere are flocking to shelters so they can move to the top of the list for permanent subsidized housing, city officials say. Dorian and Renita Steeley and their three children, for example, were […]
