FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
Reports and opinion pieces in the mainstream press heralded speeches on the urban crisis given in March 1992 by Senators Bill Bradley and John F. Kerry as “courageous and important,” “straight talk” that expressed “bravery and candor.” (New Republic, 4/27/92; U.S. News & World Report, 4/20/92; New York Times, 3/29/92) New York Times columnist A.M. […]
At every home team baseball game, there are the same players, same ballpark, same uniforms, same rules. But the media would never conclude that coverage should shut down because there’s nothing new. Somehow, though, the standard that would never be applied to sports is the rule of thumb for covering cities: Ho-hum, they’re still poor […]
I often felt that the media assumed that, to be black, one had to espouse leftist ideas and Democratic politics. Any black who deviated from the ideological litany of requisites was an oddity and was to be cut from the herd and attacked…. There was, indeed, in my view, a complicity and penchant on the […]
A 1943 San Francisco Examiner cartoon depicted Japanese-American men, drawn with huge buck teeth and thick eyeglasses, crossing their fingers as they recited the pledge of allegiance in a World War II concentration camp. The caption explained that “most of the Japs” crossed their fingers during the pledge—as a justification for why 120,000 people of […]
The pundits had a dream—the Virginia Gov. Douglas Wilder would drive Jesse Jackson from the public stage. Doug Wilder, a self-described fiscal conservative who advocated budget cuts, supported capital punishment and bragged of his state’s “right to work” (anti-union) laws, was a moderate black who would, in the words of the 1992 Almanac of American […]
Patrick Buchanan and David Duke today find themselves in the same place—using nearly identical issues and rhetoric to challenge George Bush from the right. But they took different paths to get to this point: Duke rose to prominence through the use of KKK robes; Buchanan rode a more conventional vehicle: television. Although Duke recently received […]
News media consistently deferred to David Duke when framing his candidacy for governor of Louisiana, calling him a “former Ku Klux Klan leader” and an “ex-Nazi.” Such descriptions are deceptive, for there is little that is “former” or “ex-” about Duke’s white supremacist beliefs.
Most mainstream human rights organizations place a de facto priority on questions of physical integrity and violations of political and civil rights. Social and economic rights are addressed only insofar as they have a direct bearing on the political and civil issues; labor organizing, for example, is a form of free association, and restraints on […]
In a cover story on crack (11/28/88), Newsweek tells us that the residents of America’s “Crack Nation” are both poor and black and white and middle class. Yet when I looked at the pictures, conspicuously missing were the white and middle-class residents that Newsweek assured me also lived there. The blacks were profiled in the […]
Addressing the American Society of Newspaper Editors (4/13/88), President Ronald Reagan asserted that criticism of Jesse Jackson had been muted because of concern that it “might be misinterpreted into some kind of racial attack.” The president seemed to be adding his voice to the popular media refrain: When will Jackson’s “free ride” with the press […]
It is ironic that as Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip are being beaten, arrested and killed, CBS TV chose to portray a Palestinian as a terrorist and not as a victim of terror. The recent CBS special (1/10/88) Terrorist on Trial: The United States vs. Salim Ajami perpetuates the media myth: […]
