FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
Reporting on last week’s closure of the 150-year-old Denver Rocky Mountain News, Juan Gonzalez and Amy Goodman (Democracy Now!, 2/27/09) give us the financial backstory behind the fact that “the newspaper industry is going through a major, major upheaval in these last few days”: “A lot of the papers ended up being bought in recent […]
Immigrant rights advocate and independent journalist Roberto Lovato is worried (Huffington Post, 2/26/09) that Maricopa County, Arizona, Sheriff Department Detective Aaron Douglas “deals with the world’s media more than most” when flacking for Joe Arpaio–“America’s Toughest Sheriff”–“Though he is a local official, his is often the first voice heard by many of the foreign correspondents […]
In his online column (2/26/09) for the Maynard Institute, Journal-isms, Richard Prince reports on those who see the New York Post‘s recent cartoon of a chimpanzee shot-dead–so that now “they’ll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill”–as “an opportunity to examine the factors that led to the cartoon’s appearance in the […]
The February 18 Democracy Now! segment on Fox reality TV star Sheriff Joe Arpaio features Arizona’s East Valley Tribune reporter Ryan Gabrielson telling Amy Goodman exactly how Arpaio’s officers went to the homes of the two publishers for Phoenix New Times, which—there was an investigation being conducted into a case where New Times published Joe […]
The Southern Poverty Law Center’s Mark Potok (HateWatch, 2/13/09) gives a review of Ann Coulter’s lengthy history of “sliming everyone and everything she disagrees with” before disclosing that, “despite denouncing school desegregation as a ‘spectacular’ failure, Coulter has generally avoided bolstering white supremacist hate groups. Until now, that is”: In her latest foaming-mouth tome–Guilty: Liberal […]
La Frontera Times reporter Alfredo Gutierrez has the latest (2/6/09) from new Fox reality show star Joe Arpaio. The Arizona sheriff, under FBI investigation for violating civil rights in his crusade against immigration, recently marched all of the Maricopa County immigrant detainees–chained together in full prisoner uniforms–down the street “from the Durango Jail to the […]
Wendy Norris of the Colorado Independent (2/2/09) reports that the “National Hispanic Media Coalition is urging the FCC to explore the extent, effects and potential counter-responses to ethnic bias on radio” and “probe whether there is a connection between odious radio yakking and hate crimes.” The coalition’s latest focus is a UCLA Chicano Studies Research […]
There were early indications that corporate media coverage of Barack Obama’s candidacy would be squirm-inducing, putting on display the elite (mainly white) press corps’ murky ideas about race much more than any straightforward reckoning of black Americans’ situation or what an Obama presidency might mean for their concerns. Journalists were sometimes embarrassingly frank about how […]
Your daily dose of radio bigotry is brought to you by the super-hater team of Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter. Rush recently hosted Coulter on his radio show (RushLimbaugh.com, 1/16/09), where they got down to some of the racist banter they’re so famous for: Rush: Arianna [Huffington], you need a translator. Coulter: And George Soros! […]
Finding it “more than ironic” and even “disturbing and more than a little sad,” Norman Solomon (Creators Syndicate, 1/17/09) points out that “at the same time that the United States is inaugurating a new presidency that marks the crashing of a racial barrier at the White House,” the African-American-centric News & Notes–a show “actually staffed […]
In the wake of NY Times foreign affairs columnist Thomas Friedman’s call today for terrorism against Palestinian civilians in Gaza, a new FAIR Action Alert is calling on the Times to clarify whether this column meets the paper’s standards. You can post copies of your letters to the New York Times in the comments section […]
[mp3-jplayer tracks=”CounterSpin010909 Ali Abunimah and AC Thompson @https://eadn-wc04-3257648.nxedge.io/audio/counterspin/CounterSpin010909.mp3″] Download MP3 This week on CounterSpin: The carnage in Gaza has provoked international outrage among many journalists outside the U.S., but journalists in the U.S. are largely holding on to a storyline that says that Israel is merely defending itself after Hamas broke a ceasefire. We’ll talk […]
It seems, on the face of it, a theory too absurd to even be taken seriously: A ragtag band of anti-poverty activists pushes the White House into forcing lenders to make bad loans to poor and minority borrowers, setting off a subprime loan crisis that puts the entire global economy at risk. Yet in the […]
FAIR founder Jeff Cohen and longtime FAIR associate Norman Solomon have compiled their 17th annual list of “P.U.-litzer Prizes” (OpEd News, 12/18/08). Among this year’s “stinkiest media performances”: HOT FOR OBAMA PRIZE — MSNBC‘s Chris Matthews This award sparked fierce competition, but the cinch came on the day Obama swept the Potomac Primary in February–when […]
A major–and majorly disturbing–story of post-Katrina New Orleans is broken (12/17/08) by an independent reporter at the Nation who finds evidence of up to 11 black people shot by white vigilantes in one New Orleans neighborhood immediately after the hurricane. A.C. Thompson writes that over the course of an 18-month investigation, I tracked down figures […]
Associated Press TV writer Lynn Elber reports (12/18/08) the bad news that, “nearly a decade after the NAACP condemned a ‘virtual whiteout’ in broadcast TV, the civil rights group said major networks have stalled in their efforts to further ethnic diversity on-screen and off.” Even worse, television shows of the future could be even less […]
David Ansen (Newsweek, 12/22/08) has a point when he says that the movie Borat “epitomized the [Bush] era.” But he strikes a jarring note when he says: Racism, misogyny and homophobia come pouring out of the mouths of [Sasha] Baron Cohen’s unsuspecting dupes, and in a time of political correctness, when the slightest suggestion of […]
WeCanStopTheHate.org brings its fight against hate speech to online media with a post (12/10/08) about reports that Facebook board of directors member Peter Thiel “recently donated $1 million to the anti-immigrant group NumbersUSA,” which the Southern Poverty Law Center “identified… as one of six core organizations in the anti-immigration movement.” Founded by John Tanton and […]
There was an Editorial Observer piece in the New York Times today (12/4/08) that really read like a piece from the segregated South of the 1950s, taking the side of the Jim Crow-enforcing sheriff against the outside agitators. The piece described an event at a church in Patchogue, N.Y., that encouraged immigrants to talk about […]
Noam Chomsky points out that a Boston Globe analysis (11/9/08) of the Obama victory claims that the president-elect owes nothing to “traditional Democratic constituencies” like labor, women, ethnic minorities and the peace movement, because a “grassroots army of millions”—seemingly unconnected to such constituencies—”propelled” Obama’s win. It’s worth noting, however, that this idea of a Democratic […]
