FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
The balance between covering hate and promoting it is a difficult one, and one that we shouldn’t dismiss out of hand. But after a week of wall-to-wall coverage, most of which one could imagine the Nazi Dork and his Nazi friends reading and posting to Facebook with a smirk, the balance has come down heavily on the side of fascist agitprop.
Over the past two weeks, pundits from all ends of the spectrum have been scrambling to explain Clinton’s unexpected loss, with reasons spanning from the plausible to the highly dubious; Lately, a new, entirely bogus culprit has emerged from center and center-left circles: “identity politics” and its close cousin, “political correctness.”
How do you describe a man who propagates white supremacy, misogyny and antisemitism? If you’re the New York Times, Steve Bannon is a “provocateur.” If you’re the AP, you say his hire is evidence of Trump’s “brash, outsider instincts.”
Stephen Bannon, the Trump campaign chief executive and the announced “Chief Strategist and Senior Counselor to the President” in the Trump administration, has declared of Breitbart, the website he still heads, “We’re the platform for the alt-right.” What did he mean by that?
Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children has joined that peculiar 21st century phenomenon: the kids’ movie with an all-white cast except for the villain.
“We’re the platform for the alt-right,” Donald Trump’s campaign CEO, Stephen Bannon, told Mother Jones’ David Corn (8/22/16)—“we” meaning Breitbart News, the online news outlet that Bannon headed until he was picked to run the turbulent Trump campaign.
Rather than giving one definition of the alt-right, Breitbart News chooses to describe it piece by piece. Let’s put the pieces together and see what kind of picture it makes.
The first instinct of many in the US press and political class is to treat Trump as if he’s some foreign entity, an exotic outsider who can only be referenced with regard to Less Civilized Countries.
The New York Times attempts to provide insight into how modern-day racists negotiate the contemporary racial terrain. But this is hard to do, given that the Times along with other establishment media outlets are a crucial part of that terrain.
We’re talking here about violence towards people of color, we’re talking about racism, we’re talking about transphobia, we’re talking about homophobia. These are all the systems that are creating constant violence in our communities every day.
Lack of curiosity about the influence of the violent far-right is a long tradition in US corporate media; don’t expect the murder of Jo Cox to change that.
New York Times op-ed writer Thomas Edsall (6/1/16) sets out to examine the role resentment plays in fueling the movement behind Donald Trump—but does so in such an uncritical way that he seems to adopt Trump voters’ resentments as his own.
It’s naturally worth listening to a range of Native American people, but that happens so rarely in media that a Washington Post poll merits some scrutiny. For some, the word to describe its results would not be the one the Post chose—”unambiguous.”
Those reading New York Times Real Estate sections on a quiet Saturday morning aren’t expecting in-depth investigations. But the uncritical adoption of industry language has the paper of record either repeating or allowing others to repeat rather tone-deaf colonial language and tropes.
“When you were talking about the first opiate laws, those were against Chinese people. The first cocaine laws are against black people, with the New York Times screaming about the Negro cocaine menace.”
Why did CNN describe the mostly urban, not particularly white states that Bernie Sanders won as “largely white and rural”?
“There is a sad and deep record of companies and the government making very poor decisions of how to treat the information of vulnerable people.”
“With the Trump/Klan controversy, these various incidents at Trump rallies…you realize that this is still a potent, driving factor in United States politics and society.”
Media generally fail to take the body of ideas known as white supremacy seriously in a journalistic way, even when it’s connected to violence. How do we inform and change the conversation?
without destroying your relationship there—bringing up the status of people of color at the network
