FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
There are two ways to approach being evenhanded: You can try to actually be evenhanded, which could mean that you find that one side is right and the other is wrong. Or you can strive for the appearance of being evenhanded, which means that you decide in advance that you’re going to find that there’s […]
The usual criticisms of the Iowa caucuses–that the votes of a small, demographically unrepresentative slice of America gobble up too much airtime–are basically correct. As David Sirota noted in Salon (1/3/12): The same journalism industry that pleads poverty to justify cutting big city newspapers’ editorial staffs, gutting coverage of state legislatures and city councils, and […]
Political campaign watchers seem to agree that the election will be about the economy, and that Republicans probably won’t have much to say about Obama’s foreign policy (partly because it doesn’t much differ from what a Republican president might be doing). The New York Times‘ Richard Oppel has a piece today headlined, “Republican Candidates Aim […]
In the New York Times corrections box (6/7/11): An article on Monday about Rick Santorum, a former senator from Pennsylvania who is seeking the Republican presidential nomination, omitted the name of one of the other declared candidates, who number six, not five. Ron Paul, a Republican congressman from Texas, is also running. One of the […]
Philadelphia Weekly intern and Prometheus Radio Project volunteer Alyssa Figueroa has produced an excellent document of local media activists taking on global news coverage in her video showing how “nearly 100 people marched to the Philadelphia Inquirer‘s office demanding the paper publish more factual pieces about the coup in Honduras.” PW tells us (7/30/09) that […]
When influential institutions treat those responsible for torture as worthy experts, society risks losing things even more valuable than “thoughtful conversation.”
Disney/ABC radio personality Paul Harvey, one of the most widely heard commentators in the United States, presented his listeners on June 23 with an endorsement of genocide and racism that would have been right at home on a white supremacist shortwave broadcast. Harvey’s commentary began by citing a speech by British Prime Minister Winston Churchill […]
Newsweek ran a sensational claim based on an anonymous source who turned out to be completely wrong. While one can’t blame the subsequent violence entirely on this report, it’s fair to say that credulous reporting like this contributed to a climate in which many innocent Muslims died. The inaccurate Newsweek report appeared in the magazine’s […]
When U.S. POWs were put on Iraqi state TV during the invasion in March 2003, U.S. newspapers denounced this as a war crime in the harshest possible terms: “The Iraqi regime’s outlaw nature was on full display Sunday as it flouted international law on how to treat prisoners of war,” editorialized the Kansas City Star […]
When Slobodan Milosevic was first taken before the tribunal at the Hague last year, USA Today applauded the event (7/3/01): Putting Milosevic on trial for his “wars of ethnic cleansing,” which “left thousands dead and displaced,” the paper wrote, could succeed in “deterring future world leaders bent on genocide or other atrocities.” The tribunal, in […]
