FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
Progressive and alternative media in the Global North have long portrayed Bolivia’s deposed Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) government as repressive, pro-capitalist, and anti-environment—all in the name of “left” critique.
Incisive, forceful and funny progressive columnist and author Molly Ivins died January 31 from breast cancer at the age of 62. Ivins’ career included stints as a police reporter at the Minneapolis Star Tribune and a reporter at the New York Times, but most came to know her work through reading her syndicated column, which […]
When Air America declared bankruptcy on October 13, conservatives who’d been predicting its failure since it launched 30 months earlier were afforded a new chance to gloat and scoff at the notion that liberal radio hosts could ever compete with what they see as the stunningly talented conservatives who dominate the medium (O’Reilly Factor, 10/13/06; […]
Although progressive hosts like Michael Jackson and Bernie Ward have been around for years, progressive talk as a recognized format began in 2004, when Air America Radio was born and the Jones Radio Networks began to syndicate Fargo, N.D.-based Ed Schultz nationally. Since then, the format has attracted major newsmakers, big-name politicians and famous authors. […]
[Note: This piece is a sidebar to Rough Road to Liberal Talk Success.] One talk radio talking point for conservatives and establishment observers alike is that progressive politics don’t “work” on talk radio because they are too nuanced and therefore not reducible to the sort of clear-cut moral terms that get talk radio audiences fired […]
October 15, 2004 In a chilling attack on free speech, U.S. authorities on October 7 seized two internet servers in London belonging to the independent media network Indymedia. More than 20 Indymedia sites around the world were taken down as a result of the raid. The servers were returned on October 14, but no formal […]
Why have a series of unsubstantiated claims about John Kerry’s Vietnam service become the defining issue of the presidential race? Also: Kyle Johnson, host of “Radio Free Silver” shares what happened when his liberal talk show joined the right-learning radio station, KNFT, in Silver City, New Mexico.
“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 […]
Commercial talk radio, like television punditry, is politically lopsided, dominated by the likes of Dr. Laura Schlesinger and Rush Limbaugh. The airspace for voices that tackle political issues from a progressive perspective even seems to be shrinking; two progressive shows–Pat Thurston of Santa Rosa, Calif., and Chicago’s Mike Malloy–were canceled earlier this year. The February […]
The U.S. media system has very few places where dissenting voices can be regularly heard, unconstrained by the interests of corporate owners or the censorship of advertiser dependence. There may be no more important exceptions to this rule than the five radio stations owned by the Pacifica Foundation–the Bay Area’s KPFA, Los Angeles’ KPFK, New […]
Make your own media! I’m what they call a “media critic”—I teach a course called Politics of Media as a journalism professor at the State University of New York’s College at Old Westbury, and criticize media plenty, especially in the pages of Extra!. My focus is on concentration of media ownership, especially its impact on […]
Around 300 journalists, activists and critics crowded into a room at the Media & Democracy Congress in San Francisco on March 1 to discuss the coverage of issues related to gender. For once, alternative and progressive media came under as much fire as the commercial mainstream. Nation columnist Katha Pollitt recalled that in 1995 she […]
From Rush Limbaugh to G. Gordon Liddy, commercial radio has long been a megaphone for right-wing talk-show hosts. And even NPR mostly mirrors mainstream news (Extra!, 4-5/93). But now some left/populist static for Limbaugh and his ilk is as close as your AM dial. We the People with Jerry Brown airs the renegade former California […]
