FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
“If ICE is acting with such impunity and disregard for human life in broad daylight…what happens inside of immigration detention centers?”
These are just a few of the void-filling conversations it’s been our pleasure to host in the last year.
“You can’t talk about media without talking about power, because you know and I know that much media is about sucking up to power.”
Mumia Abu-Jamal’s 1982 conviction exposed flagrant flaws in corporate media’s storytelling around crime and punishment and race and power.
The different treatment accorded to the plights of Palestinian and Israeli prisoners by US corporate media illustrates a persistent double standard that treats some people as more human than others.
“They’re actually using immigration enforcement as a pretense to go after people who don’t agree with their ideas.”
“What invest/divest demands is the investing in mental health support, the investing in first responders who actually know what to do in a crisis,”
Overt, proud-of-it bias has shaped coverage of Mumia Abu-Jamal’s case from the outset, and current mentions suggest little has changed.
Coverage dances around the fact that there are plenty of workers available in a state with 2.5 million people currently unemployed.
“Sentencing in the United States is way too extreme and has racist roots, and there should be an intentional effort to revisit them and recalibrate them.”
“The portion of the population that gets to weigh in on whether or not prisons should exist as they do, or how they’re run, is largely in the dark about what happens behind the walls.”
Prisons are shielded from public view on purpose, and journalists have to work hard for access when it’s possible at all. The result is a media landscape that pairs relative silence about prison life with an absurdly outsized focus on crime
Arissa Hall: “Black folks are very familiar with…communal gathering of resources for liberation, as it goes back to during slavery, when black folks also had to buy their freedom.”
AP quotes the Saudi king saying he and Donald Trump will “‘forge a new partnership’ in the war against extremism.” Medea Benjamin brings the skepticism AP forgot to add.
Where you oppress people and where there’s bias and behavior that’s fundamentally immoral, where there’s a lack of healthcare, where there are people dying in infirmaries in prison, you’re going to see resistance.
You wouldn’t know it from corporate press, but what may have been the largest prison labor strike in the country’s history happened September 9. This country is supposedly taking a bipartisan “fresh look” at mass incarceration; so what does elite media’s collective yawn say about their actual interest in what happens to people once they are behind bars?
On the 45th anniversary of the Attica prison uprising, inmate laborers at 40 prisons in 24 states across the country went on strike. But most national corporate news outlets thought that the potential of history being made needed little to no news coverage.
“Nearly everyone who’s being arrested or incarcerated is incurring criminal justice debt. And in many states you can be stripped of your right to vote until you pay off all of your criminal justice debt. So I talk about that essentially as a modern day poll tax.”
if we’re a country that holds ourselves out as the shining city on the hill, then we have to look at the damage that we have done to communities, particularly to African-American and Latino, poor communities in this country, because of disparate treatment and policing.
The New York Times tells readers Barack Obama was moved to negotiate a deal with Iran because of his personal “faith in diplomacy.” Our guest has an alternate view.
