FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
The big Israel/Palestine news of the week is Richard Goldstone’s op-ed in the Washington Post on Sunday (4/3/11). The short version you pick up from the media is that Goldstone has “retracted” his UN-sponsored report on war crimes during Israel’s Operation Cast Lead war in Gaza in late 2008 and early 2009. The “retraction” language […]
Richard Cohen recently (FAIR Blog, 2/15/11) took to the Washington Post to argue that Teach for America is wonderful because…. Well, it just is. He predicted that the “best teacher in America” is likely to be drawn from the ranks of the program, which draws recent graduates from elite universities into the teaching profession. His […]
Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen‘s Teach for America column today (2/15/11) demonstrates a real problem with logic. “Cut Teach for America Funding and We’ll Be Closer to Flunking the Future,” declares the headline, with Cohen kicking things off this way: The best teacher in America was in Washington over the weekend. So was the best […]
Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen uses WikiLeaks as a jumping off point to talk about George W. Bush’s new book and the run-up to the Iraq War (11/30/10): As my colleague, the indefatigably indefatigable Walter Pincus, has pointed out, Bush manages to bollix up both the chronology and the importance of the various inspections of […]
Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen writes today of Iran’s nuclear program: They then turned themselves in to the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna and, as usual, said the site was intended for the peaceful use of nuclear energy. These Persians lie like a rug. Classy. The fact that this appears in a column chastising […]
Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen uses the Frank Ricci Supreme Court case to attack affirmative action: The justification for affirmative action gets weaker and weaker. Maybe once it was possible to argue that some innocent people had to suffer in the name of progress, but a glance at the White House strongly suggests that things […]
A couple of recent FAIR Blog posts have dealt with apologists for torture: Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen and former CIA interrogator John Kiriakou, who misled ABC News about the effectiveness of waterboarding. What’s striking is how they both offer the same insight into why torture is attractive—it met their post–September 11 psychological needs. Kiriakou […]
In his column today, Washington Post‘s Richard Cohen tells us that he is against torture, which itself is not remarkable. His real point is this: Yet the debate over torture has been infected with silly arguments about utility: whether it works or not. Of course it works—sometimes or rarely, but if a proverbial bomb is […]
Richard Cohen’s Washington Post column today (4/14/09) is about how the new George W. Bush Policy Institute should focus primarily on Bush’s managerial errors: Conventional wisdom holds that the bungling of the Iraq war was a consequence of ideology run amok. Maybe. But it was also an example of awful management. Whether you supported the […]
Dean Baker (Beat the Press, 3/17/09) weighs in on Richard Cohen’s defense of Jim Cramer, accusing the Washington Post columnist of “continuing the stream of excuses for the financial media’s failure to warn of the economic crisis.” Baker sees “an effort to imply that the issues involved were very complex” lying “at the center of […]
Many observers praised the Daily Show‘s Jon Stewart for his hard-hitting interview with CNBC‘s Jim Cramer. Columnist Richard Cohen (Washington Post, 3/17/09) begs to differ. Actually, Stewart was “wrong” to go after Cramer, Cohen wrote—it was a “cheap shot at business media.” His main argument is that Stewart charged that Cramer “knew all the time […]
Looking back on the good old days when we all supported torture, Richard Cohen writes today in the Washington Post (1/27/09): “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” So goes an aphorism that needs to be applied to the current debate over whether those who authorized and used torture should be […]
Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen was one of John McCain’s strongest media defenders—and that’s saying a lot—up until about the time of the Sarah Palin pick, which seemed to convince Cohen that it wasn’t true that there was only so far McCain would go before “his pride or his sense of honor takes over.” Since […]
