FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
George Bush received glowing reviews from corporate media for his March 21st news conference performance. Phyllis Bennis of the Institute for Policy Studies joins to offer some much needed scrutiny of the president’s remarks. Also on the show: Garance Franke-Ruta with The American Prospect discusses the New York Times’s op-ed page and its consensus on abortion.
When women’s basketball star Sheryl Swoopes publicly came out of the closet on October 26, she became one of the first openly gay athletes in professional team sports, and by far the most famous. It was a groundbreaking step made all the more remarkable by Swoopes’ star power: The WNBA’s only three-time MVP and a […]
Slate.com editor and legal commentator Dahlia Lithwick discusses why damning recent reports on Guantánamo Bay have received minimal attention from news outlets. Also on the show: Sheila Gibbons, editor of the quarterly Media Report to Women, joins to talk about what needs to be done to improve representation of women in media.
In the December issue of Extra!, FAIR published a study of the guest list on C-SPAN‘s Washington Journal. Though C-SPAN‘s “flagship viewer call-in program” prides itself on its reputation for fairness, FAIR’s study found that reputation does not reflect reality. But C-SPAN‘s response thus far has been silence. Extra! studied Washington Journal‘s guestlist, tabulating all […]
Since 1979, C-SPAN has provided an invaluable service to viewers with its no-frills coverage of congressional hearings, press briefings, demonstrations, book readings and other political events. By presenting public affairs with a minimal intrusion by hosts or reporters, C-SPAN has gained a reputation as a frictionless conveyer of raw political information to the public. In […]
When Susan Estrich launched a public attack in February on Los Angeles Times op-ed page editor Michael Kinsley for not including enough women on his pages, it made a brief stir in certain (mostly female) circles of the media. But the problem runs deeper than the op-ed pages of prominent newspapers; female opinions are muted […]
[Note: this piece is a sidebar to Opinion Omission] When Harvard president Laurence Summers suggested that “intrinsic aptitude” might be holding women back in math and the sciences, the opinions sparked at major media outlets demonstrated the predictability of a punditocracy that itself lacks gender balance and diversity. In the initial stir toward the end […]
What’s the state of the Iraq debate now that the two-year anniversary of the Iraq war has come and gone? Also: author and Nation columnist Katha Pollitt on women and media.
In recent weeks, criticism of the shortage of women’s bylines on newspaper op-ed pages has roiled the media waters, prompted by syndicated columnist Susan Estrich’s attack on Los Angeles Times op-ed page editor Michael Kinsley for his failure to bring more women onto the Times‘ op-ed page. This issue certainly deserves discussion, but the problem […]
Andrea Mackris, an associate producer for Fox News Channel’s The O’Reilly Factor, filed a sexual harassment lawsuit against host Bill O’Reilly on October 13. O’Reilly has countersued Mackris and her attorney for extortion, claiming that they demanded $60 million to settle the case out of court–a claim Mackris’s attorney rejects. As some news accounts have […]
Public demonstrations play a vital role in a democracy, providing a forum where ordinary citizens can potentially make their voices heard and put their concerns on a policy agenda that is otherwise largely set by the government and other elites. But when an extraordinary number of people flooded Washington, D.C. to demonstrate for women’s reproductive […]
In 1992, many suspected that Clarence Thomas would not have become a Supreme Court justice if U.S. media had taken women more seriously. A decade later, it’s hard not to feel the same way about Arnold Schwarzenegger. Given different media coverage, Californians might still have elected him governor on October 7, but Schwarzenegger would surely […]
The latest hire by the cable news network MSNBC— co-owned by General Electric/NBC and Microsoft— is Michael Savage, a radio talkshow host noted for his unabashed bigotry. Savage is scheduled to have his own weekly one-hour show on MSNBC beginning in March. Savage routinely refers to non-white countries as “turd world nations” and charges that […]
On an average weeknight, ABC World News Tonight, CBS Evening News and NBC Nightly News are tuned in by approximately one-quarter of television-viewing homes in the U.S. (Nielsen Media Research, 2001)—about two-thirds of the U.S. public that claims to follow current events regularly (Pew Research Center, 2000). In 22 minutes the newscasts deliver snapshots of […]
There was a moment in the war against Afghanistan when the Bush administration appeared to care about nothing so much as women’s liberation. Out came first lady Laura Bush to talk to the nation about the matter. On November 16, she became what her publicists cheered was “the first first lady to deliver an entire […]
In the weeks leading up to the U.S. bombing campaign in Afghanistan, news watchers grew accustomed to poll stories with headlines like the Washington Post’s “Public Unyielding in War Against Terror; 9 in 10 Back Robust Military Response” (9/29/01). The numbers seemed overwhelming: Two out of three respondents to the Post poll “would favor military […]
During the weeks following September’s terrorist attacks, two leading dailies used their op-ed pages as an echo chamber for the government’s official policy of military response, mostly ignoring dissenters and policy critics. A FAIR survey of the New York Times and the Washington Post op-ed pages for the three weeks following the attacks (9/12/01–10/2/01) found […]
On June 28, 1995, FBI agents swarmed the headquarters of Archer Daniels Midland, “Supermarket to the World,” in Decatur, Illinois. So began the sensational unraveling of the biggest price-fixing scandal ever, involving a secret FBI informant, a suicide attempt, top ADM officials being sentenced to prison and the largest criminal anti-trust fine in history. Throughout […]
The New York Times (8/22/99) declared the glass ceiling “shattered” when Hewlett Packard’s Carly Fiorina became the third female CEO of a Fortune 500 company. But if they were looking for conflicting evidence, they could start in their own backyard. As a variety of recent studies show, women continue to face a substantial glass ceiling […]
Mothers work because they’re selfish. That’s the conclusion viewers might have drawn after watching ABC and NBC news broadcasts about a recently released Census Bureau report (“Fertility of American Women,” 9/00) that showed that more mothers, especially mothers of infants, were in the work force in 1998 than ever before (73 percent and 59 percent, […]
