FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
Attempting to add appropriate context to mainstream reportage of Sunday’s murder of Kansas doctor George Tiller, the Media Justice Fund blog has reprinted (6/1/09) an October 8, 2006, Women In Media & News post by Jennifer Pozner titled “The Terrorists Who Aren’t in the News: Anti-Abortion Fanatics Spread Fear by Bombings, Murders and Assaults, but […]
“If media reports are to be believed,” Gabriel Arana of the Nation writes (5/27/09), “an Armageddon-like rash of drug-related violence–unlike any seen since ‘Miami Vice years of the 1980s‘–has crossed from Mexico into the United States, ‘just as government officials had feared.’” But that’s a pretty big if, even though “in the national media, it’s […]
Claiming that he doesn’t “know at this point whether Judge Sonia Sotomayor is a good choice for Supreme Court justice or a bad one,” critic Dave Lindorff (ThisCantBeHappening.net, 5/28/09) does note that she “is a lousy judge for writers and other creative people” for ruling “that the [New York] Times and periodical publishers could reprint, […]
This Associated Press story (“Debate Over Who Sotomayor Is a Sensitive One,” 5/29/09) sure is confused. Luckilyreporter Sharon Thiemermakes at least that much clear from the very start: There are two sides to Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor: a Latina from a blue-collar family and a wealthy member of America’s power elite. The White House […]
Political Animal‘s Steve Benen (5/12/09) notes a recent Rush Limbaugh broadcast (5/11/09) that makes the racist subtext of the right’s critique of Barack Obama virtually explicit: The [economic] deterioration reflects lower tax revenues and higher costs for bank failures, unemployment benefits and food stamps. But in the Oval Office of the White House none of […]
Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen uses the Frank Ricci Supreme Court case to attack affirmative action: The justification for affirmative action gets weaker and weaker. Maybe once it was possible to argue that some innocent people had to suffer in the name of progress, but a glance at the White House strongly suggests that things […]
Reporting on how “Jay Severin, the fiery right-wing talkshow host on Boston’s WTKK-FM radio station, was suspended yesterday,” (5/1/09), the Boston Globe‘s David Abel lists just a few of the “fiery” jock’s “incendiary comments”: In one of his broadcasts this week, Severin said: “So now, in addition to venereal disease and the other leading exports […]
Noting that, “for the last decade or so, Washington has indulged Pat Buchanan as a sort of crazy political uncle” by having “agreed to forget about his long track record of racially questionable commentary and writing,” TPM Muckraker‘s Zachary Roth and Justin Elliott (4/24/09) have caught a column “for the far-right web magazine, Human Events,” […]
ABC‘s Good Morning America did a special 3-part series on race this week, “Black and White Now,” to “look at race relations in America.” All three parts revisited old experiments or news stories. The first (3/31/09) was a repeat of an experiment with children playing with black and white dolls, showing that now kids don’t […]
In just over a month last winter, two Latino men were beaten to death in New York state while their attackers shouted racial slurs and epithets (Philadelphia Inquirer, 1/25/09). Such hate crimes, motivated by anti-immigrant prejudice and other bigotries, have spurred a media justice campaign to reveal the potential human costs of hate speech. When […]
The Maynard Institute’s Richard Prince (Journal-isms, 3/30/09) has a look at “a two-day conference in Washington called ‘1968 and Beyond: A Symposium on the Impact of the Black Power Movement on America,’” with “hardly anyone from the mainstream media…there to cover it.” Urging his readers to “think beyond the news media script that often pits […]
Media Bistro‘s Christine Delargy quotes (3/23/09) at length from a letter to the Washington Post questioning the “lack of diversity on WaPo‘s Sunday editorial pages”: Sunday’s editorial pages are presumably the most-read of the week. They should represent the most critical and varied thinking of the week and set the standard for editorial pages. Help […]
Reporting that “L.A. Times blogger Andrew Malcolm started a web freakout” by suggesting “that the White House was blocking press access to a ceremony with the National Newspaper Publisher’s Association,” American Prospect blogger Adam Serwer (3/20/09) writes that, “in fact, part of the ceremony was an exclusive interview which naturally, the NNPA didn’t want other […]
The Southern Poverty Law Center’s Mark Potok has the latest (HateWatch, 3/19/09) on CNN‘s “Lou Dobbs, the insult-spewing Latino-basher”: Dobbs, of course, is known for regularly pushing defamatory falsehoods about undocumented immigrants–they fill one third of American prison and jail cells, they’re part of a secret Mexican plan to “reconquer” the American Southwest, they are […]
Caitlin Flanagan, primarily known (and embraced by mainstream media) for her anti-feminist writings, was back in the New York Times this weekend—this time attacking former ’70s radical Sara Jane Olson. As a member of the Symbionese Liberation Army, Olson (born Kathleen Soliah) was indicted for plotting to bomb LAPD patrol cars; she evaded capture until […]
Journal-isms writer Richard Prince is highlighting (3/19/09) an article in the current issue of GQ headlined “You Think Your Job Sucks? Try Working for Lenny Dykstra”–the title of which might be an understatement, considering some of its reporting therein: A photo editor’s unflattering portrait of baseball-player-turned-financial adviser Lenny Dykstra as a racist, sexist and homophobe […]
Think Progress editor Ali Frick (3/18/09) has posted video of CNN‘s celebrity xenophobe descending into the Rosie O’Donnell realm of racist ridicule of Asian language: Yesterday on his radio show, anti-immigrant crusader Lou Dobbs attacked St. Patrick’s Day as a needless “ethnic holiday.” “How about an American day,” he proposed. He also wondered whether other […]
Paying homage to “perhaps the first journalist to speak out on the racist and sexist implications of lynching,” Black Agenda Report‘s Sikivu Hutchinson (3/11/09) says that the “relative obscurity” of Ida B. Wells doesn’t reflect well on the present day: Despite her challenges to the American criminal justice system, her long record of publication at […]
With all the recent headlines posing Rush Limbaugh as the GOP’s de facto leader, Media Matters’ Julie Millican and Nathan Tabak provide a timely look back (3/3/09) at the well-documented record of hateful views espoused by the most popular talk radio host in the United States: On August 23, 2006, discussing the CBS reality TV […]
Freelance writer Sally Lehrman (3/5/09) tells us the bad times for newspapers are even worse for ethnic media–and by extension, U.S. democracy as a whole: AsianWeek, San Francisco’s English-language weekly for Asian-Americans, and San Francisco Bay View, which has served the black community there for three decades, both have dumped their print editions. Siglo21, a […]
