FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
The theme of Richard Cohen’s final Washington Post column was how lucky he’s been in his career. And it’s been lucky for us at FAIR, too, in a sense—few in the media business have provided us with as much material over the years as he as.
It’s unsurprising that Richard Cohen–notorious for his racialized worldview–evokes Latin America as a symbol of disregard for civil liberties. It’s also not surprising that as his example of bad Latin American–style oppression, he picks Nicaragua.
Perhaps Richard Cohen is sensitive to people being called racist because he’s been called a racist by many observers–and not without good reason.
The “usual measurement” offered by columnist Richard Cohen as proof of the value of charter schools offers no evidence that charter school students are any better off at all.
“The early denunciations of Snowden now seem both over the top and beside the point,” the Washington Post’s Richard Cohen writes. He should know–he wrote one of them. And now he says his initial reaction was “just plain wrong.”
Hillary Clinton hasn’t announced that she’s running for president in 2016, and launched a campaign yet. But the Washington Post is already complaining that her nonexistent campaign for an office she may or may not seek lacks a clear message. “Clinton’s gender likely would be a significant asset,” writes chief correspondent Dan Balz (8/12/13), adding: […]
It’s not everyday that a syndicated columnist endorses racial profiling. But that’s exactly what the Washington Post’s Richard Cohen did in the wake of the George Zimmerman verdict.
Ten years ago today, Colin Powell made the Bush administration’s case for going to war against Iraq, and much of what he said was false. Most of the journalists who promoted his justifications for the war paid no price for their failures.
As a general rule, it’d be better if media accounts of war did not stress the surgical precision of the weapons being used. It’s a fixture of U.S. reporting on U.S. wars, but the same rhetoric is used when U.S. allies are dropping bombs. According to Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen (11/19/12): Israel has gone […]
There’s no doubt that the sex scandal that prompted CIA director David Petraeus’s sudden resignation late last week is a big story. New details–verified or not–seem to arrive almost by the hour. But the reason it seems to have shaken so many media figures is because Petraeus was uniquely beloved by many in the corporate […]
The criticism of Mitt Romney’s time at Bain Capital doesn’t appear to be leaving the headlines. And thus some political reporters are, as Jamison Foser notes, drawing an unusual comparison: Romney is being Swift Boated. The latest example comes from Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen (7/17/12): In a sense, Romney deserves the Swift Boating he’s […]
There are different ways media talk about how you can’t trust Iran. Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen, for one, went straight for bigotry: “These Persians lie like a rug,” he wrote in 2009. The New York Times took a slightly different route on Saturday (4/14/12): Maybe Iran can’t be trusted because their religion permits—or perhaps […]
Richard Cohen says he envies people who are persuasive liars. He really ought to envy people who are persuasive writers. His column today (4/17/12) is ostensibly about how Mitt Romney is a big liar. It goes almost its entire length, though, before citing any compelling examples of Romney lying. (Cohen does say call Romney’s claim […]
Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen wrote a baffling column today (1/24/12) praising part of Newt Gingrich’s political persona—not the bad stuff, but the man “of big ideas,” as he put it (italics his). Cohen gives one example: Out of nowhere, he has exhumed Saul Alinsky, whose fame is limited to university sociology departments, and yet […]
In theory, presidential campaigns are a valuable opportunity for journalists to evaluate candidates’ positions on important issues so citizens can make an informed choice. Actual media coverage is different, of course. And it’s striking how some media voices diminish the importance of what the candidates are saying, treating it as meaningless theater that need not […]
Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen (10/24/11), tipped off by at least one of his Post colleagues, decided to pay a visit to Liberty Plaza to see the festival of antisemitism firsthand. Lo and behold, he found none: Reckless Jew that I am, I muscled my way into the Occupy Wall Street encampment in Lower Manhattan […]
Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen (9/5/11) takes the eve of the 10th anniversary of 9/11 to say that he’s sorry: I went home on September 11 with my shoes dusted with the detritus of the World Trade Center. I felt a hate that was entirely new to me. Soon after, the anthrax attacks began, and […]
There are plenty of thoughtful pieces—Drew Westen’s in the New York Times over the weekend being the most recent one—that try to figure out what’s going on with Barack Obama. Then there’s Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen today (8/9/11), who begins by retelling a story about FDR: In her autobiography, Helen Gahagan Douglas recalled telling […]
Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen wrote a rather apoplectic column about presidential candidate Michele Bachmann this week, lamenting the fact that other GOP candidates aren’t calling her out for being completely ill-prepared for the job: Bachmann does not deserve to be in the presidential race. Legislatively, she has done little, she knows next to nothing […]
Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen writes (6/7/11): I once worked for an editor who banned the word “oxymoron.” I don’t know why. It’s a good word, meaning a contradiction in terms. The dictionary offers some examples: “wise fool” and “legal murder.” I would like to cite another: Barack Obama. He sends contradictory messages. That sounds […]
