FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
“They’ve taken the most significant criminal trial of the century, the 9/11 case, and put it into a system where everything is being invented from scratch.”
September 11, 2001, is the exemplar of a past that isn’t dead, or even past, and for no one more particularly than Muslims.
A retrospective look at FAIR’s coverage of two decades of media self-censorship, scapegoating and stenography.
“We see permanent war, and that has gone throughout post-9/11. The Bush administration, the Obama administration, continued those wars, and Obama used drones in seven different countries.”
New Yorkers who were here for September 11 remember vigils, hugs from strangers and signs all over the streets reading, “Our grief is not a cry for war.” But war is what came, to the delight of many in media—first to Afghanistan, which the US invaded on October 7, 2001, and never left.
On the 18th anniversary of the September 11 attacks, as the illegal US occupation of Afghanistan continues as the longest overseas war in American history, corporate media defended the “forever war” by concern-trolling over an “overly hasty” withdrawal.
You know you’ve lived well—well enough to rattle the establishment—when the New York Times smears you in the obituary it runs about you (FAIR.org, 6/20/13). That distinction was achieved by William Blum, historian and critic of US foreign policy. Once a State Department computer programmer who aspired to “take part in the great anti-Communist […]
Fox host Bill O’Reilly knows a thing or two about boundaries. As he told his TV audience Monday night, some “far-left” radicals crossed the line on the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. New York Times columnist Paul Krugman wrote a blog post about how some Republican politicians turned the attacks into a “wedge issue,” […]
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 […]
In case you were wondering whether Irene sparked any discussions of climate change, here’s a moment from the panel discussion on ABC‘s This Week (8/30/11): RON BROWNSTEIN (National Journal): Do we want to get into a global warming and a hurricanes discussion? DONNA BRAZILE (Democratic Strategist): No. BROWNSTEIN: I mean, I don’t know if we […]
On September 17, 2001, Fox host Bill O’Reilly gave his list of countries the United States should attack, including Libya: Target three is Libya and Qaddafi. Again, he either quits and goes into exile or we bomb his oil facilities, all of them. And we mine the harbor in Tripoli. Nothing goes in, nothing goes […]
One of the odder outbreaks of outrage from conservative pundits is the horror expressed at the idea that people accused of being connected to the September 11 attacks would actually be put on trial. Here’s Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson (11/18/09) on Attorney General Eric Holder’s “destructive” decision to prosecute Khalid Mohammed and other 9/11 […]
Dick Morris was on the O’Reilly Factor the other night (10/28/09) advocating a troop escalation in Afghanistan—and his argument was characteristically peculiar: Listen, terrorist gangs like Al-Qaeda are like HIV virus. They swim in your bloodstream. They don’t make you sick. When they latch on to a cell, a nation state, and they use the […]
For the New York Post (3/27/09), it’s “Free Dumb Tower.” For the same day’s New York Daily News, it means “No More Freedom.” They’re talking about 1 World Trade Center, which is what the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey announced it was calling the skyscraper it’s building on the site of the […]
(NOTE: Please see the Activism Update regarding this alert.) When the International Association of Fire Fighters, the nation’s largest firefighters union, released a video on July 12 challenging the portrayal of former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani as a hero of the September 11, 2001 terror attacks, New York Times reporter Marc Santora rushed […]
The crisis of September 11 touched on issues from Middle Eastern politics to skyscraper architecture, Islamic theology to the threat of unconventional weapons. It was a story, in other words, that most ordinary Americans could not easily interpret without help. FAIR has conducted a study to find out which experts the three major television news […]
In the wake of a catastrophe on the scale of the destruction of the World Trade towers, one question is obvious: Why are fanatics so consumed by rage and hatred that they would give up their lives to kill thousands of civilians in the United States? Even before investigators identified Arab militants as the apparent […]
Your Tax Dollars at Work “We actually put out a false message to mislead people. . . . The idea was not to give information about the movement of our carrier. We were trying to confuse people.” —Former Joint Chiefs of Staff spokesperson Jay Coupe, acknowledging a 1988 disinformation campaign “This is the most information-intensive […]
Many news analysts and pundits lost no time conveying—sometimes with great enthusiasm—their eagerness to see the United States use its military might in anger.
