FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
Long-standing ties between Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.) and the white supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens are finally, if hesitatingly, coming to light. But at a time when the politics of impeachment have produced a number of related scandals involving a variety of Congress members, mainstream media have been slow to recognize Lott’s involvement […]
The current scandal involving Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott’s long-term association with a white supremacist hate group, the Council of Conservative Citizens, arose almost by accident. Its emergence as a major story is the result of the dogged reporting of one Washington Post reporter and a handful of mostly African-American columnists, with help from independent […]
Did self-styled anti-terrorism expert Steven Emerson help push the world toward nuclear war? On Sunday, June 28, a sensational story appeared in the British newspaper the Observer: “Pakistan was planning nuclear first strike on India.” The stunning revelation that South Asia was on the brink of thermonuclear war was credited to an unnamed “senior Pakistani […]
UPDATE to December 15 News Advisory On December 19, Washington Post editorial board member Colbert I. King began a column by calling on the Senate to reconsider Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott’s “fitness” for the job. The reason, wrote King, was Lott’s involvement with the racist Conservative Citizens (CCC), which serves as a forum for […]
UPDATE to December 11 News Advisory: Emerging evidence shows Trent Lott addressed a white supremacist group at least twice in the 1990s and is on record praising the group, contradicting statements the senator’s spokesperson made to reporters this past weekend. When charges surfaced that Senator Trent Lott supported a racist organization, the Senate leader’s spokesperson […]
During the Judiciary Committee’s impeachment hearings on Dec. 1, Rep. Bob Barr (R-Ga.) clashed with Prof. Alan Dershowitz after Dershowitz accused the lawmaker of using rhetoric laced with “bigotry” and “racism.” Barr had stated: There really are, I think, two Americas. And there is a real America out there. And I think our military witnesses […]
Prior to the June 2, 1998 vote on bilingual education in California, mainstream news polls–local and national–predicted that not only would the anti-bilingual education Proposition 227 pass, but that it would do so with the overwhelming support of Latinos, blacks and other ethnic and racial groups. Time (5/18/98), citing pre-election polls, reported that “a majority […]
Racial profiling–the discriminatory practice by police of treating blackness (or brownness) as an indication of possible criminality–has lately been the focus of frequent legal or legislative action, resulting in a significant amount of coverage in the mainstream news media (e.g. New York Times, 5/8/98, 5/10/98; Nightline, 5/31/98; Time, 6/15/98). The coverage of police racial profiling […]
There have been numerous instances when media have seized on a supposed medical “phenomenon” and hyped it beyond recognition, distorting facts irresponsibly or simply getting them wrong. But few media fabrications have been as invidious, persistent or politically devastating as that of the so-called “crack baby.” Mid-1980s case studies suggested a possible link between women’s […]
“It is a crisis of staggering proportions.” So says ABC News’ Ted Koppel at the beginning of a Nightline segment (8/27/97) on the most recent of a series of reports on the alarmingly high—and rising—numbers of African-Americans under the control of the criminal justice system. (See The Sentencing Project’s “Young Black Americans and the Criminal […]
On December December 12, 1996, New York-based syndicated radio host Bob Grant singled out immigrants from India as the target of his vitriol: It wasn’t too many years ago that most people could walk down the street and never have the pungent, sickening aroma of curry wafting up their nostrils. I don’t mean to single […]
Although you’d never know it from most U.S. media, that Russian Mars space probe carrying nearly a half-pound of deadly plutonium did not fall “harmlessly” into the sea in November 1996. It crashed into South America, breaking up into a fireball as it came down, according to eyewitnesses. When President Bill Clinton called Australian Prime […]
Thanks in part to activists from all over the country who contacted ABC and Disney, FAIR’s campaign against the bigotry of talkshow host Bob Grant has been a success. The success was not in Grant’s firing from New York’s WABC, the flagship of Disney/ABC‘s radio empire. FAIR, in fact, never called for Grant to be […]
There seems to be a growing attempt by pundits both of the right and center to claim that significant racism no longer exists. The American Enterprise Institute’s Dinesh D’Souza, of course, makes this claim in his book The End of Racism, in which he asserts that racism “no longer has the power to thwart blacks […]
Here is a sampling of Buchanan’s views: On African-Americans After Sen. Carol Moseley Braun blocked a federal patent for a Confederate flag insignia, Buchanan wrote that she was “putting on an act” by associating the Confederacy with slavery: “The War Between the States was about independence, about self-determination, about the right of a people to […]
“Quotas Quashed,” crowed the front page of the June 13 New York Post. “High Court Sinks Most Affirmative Action Programs.” Inside, Post writers described the Adarand v. Pena ruling, in which the Supreme Court tightened criteria for some race-conscious federal programs, as a “bombshell decision” that “dealt a crippling blow to affirmative action.” All the […]
There are approximately 5 million Muslims in the U.S. — nearly as many as there are Jews, and more than there are Episcopalians. Early in the next century, Islam will probably be the largest non-Christian religion in the country (L.A. Times, 12/17/94). Yet there’s rarely a mention of Muslims in the media that doesn’t have […]
After the Oklahoma City bombing, the New York Times (4/24/95) reported surprise at the existence of right-wing terror-gangs: “New Images of Terror… A suspect, a white drifter, evokes new fear.” But right-wing terror is hardly surprising to those who’ve been on the receiving end of it over the years; nor would the pale image of […]
FAIR, along with a coalition of religious and civil rights leaders, has written to ABC/Capital Cities CEO Tom Murphy to condemn the use of ABC-controlled airwaves for neo-Nazi and white supremacist recruiting. WABC radio talkshow host Bob Grant has repeatedly permitted and even assisted hate groups in giving out phone numbers and addresses on his […]
Tells the story of one unemployed lab technician widely cited in media reports as an example of the “angry white male” who ushered in the Republican victory last November. When Hirshman followed up on the story for EXTRA!she discovered that Sidney Tracy voted Democrat not Republican and actually blamed corporate downsizing — not women and […]
