FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
This week on CounterSpin: Bill Fletcher of The Black Commentator joins to discuss Obama and the Wright controversy. Also on the show: How establishment media has neglected to report on Sami al-Haj’s Guantánamo imprisonment, with journalist Andy Worthington.
Polls Apart Peter Hart’s excellent article (Extra! Update, 2/08) on the over-reliance by political pundits on polls missed only the follow-up: Despite the polls having been grossly incorrect in New Hampshire, and again and again repeatedly in subsequent primaries, the overemphasis on polls has remained undiminished! The pundits hadn’t even caught their breath talking about […]
On April 2, the New York Times noticed a trend that, if true, would indeed be worth celebrating. Under the headline “Like the Candidates, TV’s Political Pundits Show Signs of Diversity,” reporter Felicia Lee told readers: “With campaign coverage center stage on the cable channels, producers and critics are again assessing the diversity among pundits, […]
When campaign discussion focused on videotaped comments made by Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama’s pastor at the Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, it was not the first time that the press raised questions about Obama’s connections— something corporate media seem far less interested in doing with Sen. John McCain. For example, look at two […]
USA Today Reader Editor Brent Jones responded to questions, prompted by a FAIR Action Alert (1/23/08), about the newspaper’s failure to identify a white supremacist group by arguing that doing so would have been an illegitimate “judgment” on the part of the paper. USA Today had run two stories on the Nationalist Movement, a group […]
This week on CounterSpin: What the media is saying about Clinton, Obama, and the current state of the Democratic race for the White House, with Glen Ford of Black Agenda Report. Also on the program: Rob Richie with the group FairVote joins for a conversation on how media election coverage makes us feel discouraged, and what we can do about it.
USA Today twice (1/16/08; 1/21/08) allowed racist spin to go unchallenged when it identified a white supremacist group that organized a small anti-civil rights rally on Martin Luther King Day only as a “white ‘pro-majority’ group.” The Nationalist Movement mustered about 30-50 people in Jena to protest both King Day and the 20,000-strong protest held […]
This week on CounterSpin: Bad election coverage in the recent Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary, with CounterSpin’s own Peter Hart. Also on the program: Kali Akuno discusses corporate media backtracking post-Katrina and the latest debate surrounding the destruction of public housing in New Orleans.
Journalist Bob Parry, founder of the site Consortiumnews.com, has broken some of the most important stories in the last thirty years. This week he joins CounterSpin to talk about why he writes. Also on the program: New research highlights a skewed presentation of poor communities in Bay Area media, one that oversells gentrification as the solution. We’ll talk to Karlos Schmieder from Oakland-based Youth Media Council about the report.
This week Dahr Jamail joins CounterSpin to discuss his new book “Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches From An Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq.” Also on the program: Earl Ofari Hutchinson of Hutchinson Political Report unpacks Bill Cosby’s latest book and the blame it places on Black communities.
A new FAIR survey of poverty coverage on the network newscasts finds scant media interest in the topic. We’ll talk to the co-author of the report Neil deMause. Also on the show: The cable news redemption arc of the Border Patrol agents who were convicted of shooting an unarmed suspect with writer Alex Koppelman, who recently covered the story for Salon.com.
During the 20 years of FAIR’s existence, there have been two periods when mainstream journalists made promises about dedicating themselves to greater coverage of poverty, racism and inequality. The first followed the Los Angeles riots of 1992 (Extra!, 7-8/92); the second was after Hurricane Katrina destroyed much of New Orleans (Extra!, 7-8/06). Both promises went […]
This week on CounterSpin: Mark Lloyd of the Center for American Progress joins to talk about “The Structural Imbalance of Political Talk Radio.” Also on the program: A conversation with Hannah Sassaman and Dory Graham from the Prometheus Radio Project on a new resilient grassroots media movement that has been born in response to corporate consolidation and dominance. And finally: Do shifts in the radio landscape provide special promise for the black community? Bruce Dixon of Black Agenda Report has thoughts on that.
Iraq and the hyperfixation on “benchmarks,” with David Swanson of AfterDowningStreet.org. Also this week: A conversation about CNN’s Lou Dobbs with Mark Potok from the Southern Poverty Law Center.
During a May 6 60 Minutes profile, CBS reporter Lesley Stahl asked CNN anchor Lou Dobbs about a statistic cited on his program regarding immigrants and leprosy. While Dobbs assured Stahl that his show had the facts right, he was wrong. Stahl cited an April 14, 2005 report that alleged that 7,000 new cases of […]
Freelance journalist David Enders joins the show to cut through all the partisan bickering and talk about what’s actually happening in Iraq. Also this week: A dispute at the Los Angeles Times regarding the Armenian genocide, with Harut Sassounian of the California Courier.
In the aftermath of the racist, misogynist outburst that got talkshow host Don Imus dropped from CBS radio and MSNBC—referring to the Rutgers women’s basketball team as “nappy-headed hos”—a Washington Post editorial (4/10/07) posed a question many critics have been asking for years: How do prestigious journalists defend their cozy relationship with a well-known bigot? […]
“Africa is sexy and people need to know that,” declared U2 singer Bono (New York Times, 3/5/07), promoting his new (RED) line of products that propose to save Africa one iPod at a time. Celebrity interest in Africa is not particularly new, but today more stars than ever seem to be converging upon the continent, […]
The firing of Don Imus by CBS radio and MSNBC provided an opportunity for the many elite journalists who appeared on and supported his show to examine their own roles in enabling his bigotry (FAIR Media Advisory, 4/11/07). But the prospects of an honest self-examination are dim, as illustrated by this exchange on CNN‘s Reliable […]
The recent firing of talk host Don Imus by MSNBC has called attention to the culpability of big media companies and other journalists who profited from Imus’ bigotry. Journalist Richard Prince joins the show this week to discuss the situation. Also on the program: Investigative reporters Carlo Bonini and Giussepe D’Avanzo talk about their work in exposing the Niger-uranium hoax, and explain the Italian connection to the infamous pre-war reporting about Iraq’s aluminum tubes.
