FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
President Trump’s far-right immigration policies have US corporate media reaching to the white nationalist fringes of the faux-think tank world to provide “both sides” coverage on the topic.
A crucial detail has been downplayed or even ignored in many corporate media reports: the role of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in bringing slavery to the North African nation.
News managers feel the need to highlight, with little if any criticism or context, pro-Trump extremists who’ve been emboldened by his campaign and subsequent election.
“There’s a long history in this country of the FBI using the fear of threats, real or perceived, as a cover for profiling black people, and in particular black civil rights leaders and activists.”
What constitutes “extremism” is…ideologically worthless
“We look at the racial wealth divide as one of the most fundamental challenges to the American economy in the 21st century, not just a challenge of particular communities in our country.”
If we don’t intervene to turn the racial wealth gap around, we are driving the country toward what a new report describes in no uncertain times as a “racial and economic apartheid state.”
Since the Charlottesville attack a month ago, a review of commentary in the six top broadsheet newspapers—the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, USA Today, LA Times, San Jose Mercury News and Washington Post—found virtually equal amounts of condemnation of fascists and anti-fascist protesters.
“You were drawing moral equivalence between people who wanted free healthcare and people who wanted to eliminate the Jewish race.”
“Slavery was not just something that they had no interest in and no financial benefit, but slavery was actually actively bad, socially and economically, for poor whites.”
The horror of the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville—what led to it, and what could lead away from it?
“Yes, you do want to have protection for everyone. But by not focusing on the people who currently do not have those protections, you’re basically ensuring that they never will.”
For years, the existence of environmental racism, and the idea that it needs rectifying, had at least nominal government support; but now all bets are off.
A longtime FAIR friend, Jack Shaheen died on Monday. A humanist to the core, he warned about the creation of “the character whom we hate and we detest.”
Jonathan Chait’s argument is that the voters who switched from Obama to Trump had conservative social views—so if Democrats need to do anything to win in 2020, they should move to the right on race and immigration policy.
Threats to “free speech” are treated differently in the media when you’re on the left—and particularly so for campus speech.
“When you talk about white supremacy, you’ve got to take a hard look at our culture, because it is endemic, and it was here from the day this country started—even before, actually.”
The Washington Post’s headline “Trump’s Quick to Tweet on Terror and TV, Slower on Things Like the Attack in Portland,” was meant to call out Trump’s unwillingness to engage white supremacist violence, but it unwittingly illustrated the problem of elite media continuing to maintain separate spaces for extremist attacks based on who commits them.
For Richard Cohen, the Middlebury protestors are the real fascists. Not the person who’s dedicated his life to normalizing eugenics; he is a mere “conservative,” posing “controversial” questions.
The orthodoxy on the New York Times op-ed page isn’t “liberalism”; Bret Stephens is the third representative of his ideological niche, the anti-Trump conservative, to currently have a home there.
