FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
Howard Stern, a radio host whose program is syndicated by a CBS subsidiary, responded to the massacre in Littleton, Colorado by suggesting that female victims should have been raped as well as murdered. Here are Stern’s comments, as reported by the Rocky Mountain News (4/24/99): “There were some really good-looking girls running out with their […]
(Posted here with the NWLC’s kind permission) The National Desk program “Title IX and Women in Sports: What’s Wrong with This Picture?” was filled with misinformation, myth, and fabrications. In short, it was an irresponsible broadcast masquerading as serious journalism. Virtually every aspect of the program, from the title, host Larry Elder’s repeated untruths about […]
It might as well. Throughout April, the PBS program National Desk is presenting a three-part series on “the gender wars,” in which they aim to address “whether the advancement of women in virtually all areas of society can be achieved without a retreat, in some way, on the part of men.” This manipulative framing of […]
The topic of sexuality received unprecedented news media attention in the 1990s–in part due to the AIDS crisis, in part because of a national fight to bring down centuries of legal, social and cultural bias against people who are bisexual, transgendered and/or lesbian and gay. In many year-end round-ups, the media remembered 1997 as a […]
One man’s prison rape story doesn’t come close to filling this kind of vacuum and mis-reporting in the newspaper of record. “Newspapers in New York could have a full time corrections reporter, there’s so much out there,” says Gary Craig. Not a bad idea.
In July, the anti-feminist Independent Women’s Forum scored a double win worthy of the Women’s National Basketball Association: IWF representatives published op-ed articles in the New York Times (7/10/97) and the Wall Street Journal (7/11/97) on consecutive days with the very same message. And the message was repeated a third time on CBS Evening News […]
Fat has been a matter of huge media interest lately, if you’ll pardon the pun. As a nation, we’re wrestling with the fact that we’re getting fatter and fatter all the time—on average, we’ve gained eight pounds apiece in the past decade—and we don’t know what,if anything, can be done about it. The news about […]
You don’t get product ads unless you praise the product. –Gloria Steinem, founding editor of Ms. In his book Adverse Reactions, Thomas Maeder recalls the philosophy of Harry Loynd, an old-time president of Parke-Davis who was legendarily blunt. Loynd’s oft-repeated motto was “Pills are to sell, not to take.” He regarded physicians as extremely gullible, […]
It’s easy to tell what makes folks in the establishment media nervous. When black men came together in Washington, D.C. for 1995’s Million Man March, most journalists scrutinized with healthy skepticism the political agenda fueling the Nation of Islam–led event. Many came down hard and heavy on the organizers’ exclusion of women and whites. Similarly, […]
For the past four years, the debate about “welfare” has targeted women. Politicians fingered poor women as the main source of the nation’s problems, and reporters followed, creating vivid, misleading images of lazy mothers-of-dozens draining to the dregs the nation’s coffers. The pictures skewed the facts, inflating the proportion of AFDC receivers who are African-American, […]
Around 300 journalists, activists and critics crowded into a room at the Media & Democracy Congress in San Francisco on March 1 to discuss the coverage of issues related to gender. For once, alternative and progressive media came under as much fire as the commercial mainstream. Nation columnist Katha Pollitt recalled that in 1995 she […]
After years of ignoring the expertise of women’s organizations, one women’s group has stepped into the media spotlight. Members of the conservative Independent Women’s Forum aren’t pigeon-holed in the arena of “women’s issues”–you can find them critiquing the State of the Union address on Charlie Rose (PBS, 1/23/96), ridiculing liberalism on Politically Incorrect (Comedy Central, […]
Here is a sampling of Buchanan’s views: On African-Americans After Sen. Carol Moseley Braun blocked a federal patent for a Confederate flag insignia, Buchanan wrote that she was “putting on an act” by associating the Confederacy with slavery: “The War Between the States was about independence, about self-determination, about the right of a people to […]
The myth of the feminist dominatrix lives. When a handful of right-wing women founded the “Independent Women’s Forum” in 1992, they did so because “they felt invisible in a media culture that tends to represent all professional women as liberal Democrats” and they wanted “to get conservative women’s views heard in the media and on […]
Amid teenage girl magazines’ standard fare of earnest advice about boyfriends, self-esteem and cosmetics purchases, Sassy was always a stand-out. Take how Sassy dealt with the issue of flirting. The cover of the September 1994 issue might not have stood out on the newsstand—”How to Flirt Like an Animal” was the main story. But rather […]
The topic was women. The place was China. And mainstream media in the United States still managed to focus on men and politicians in D.C. Consider any topic, from the global economy to health care, to education and technology–the women in China were discussing it. Looking for a variety of perspectives on those issues? The […]
After the Oklahoma City bombing, the New York Times (4/24/95) reported surprise at the existence of right-wing terror-gangs: “New Images of Terror… A suspect, a white drifter, evokes new fear.” But right-wing terror is hardly surprising to those who’ve been on the receiving end of it over the years; nor would the pale image of […]
With the February 1 ABC News special, Boys and Girls Are Different: Men, Women and the Sex Difference, reported by correspondent John Stossel, hormonally induced haircut prices joined gay brains and race-based IQ as the politically charged science of the media moment. The show asked the eternal question, “Are men and women supposed to be […]
One breezy October evening three weeks before last fall’s election, Ellen Messer-Davidow, an associate professor at the University of Minnesota, advised New York feminists to start reading the writings of the right. Because most progressives don’t spend their time perusing conservative publications, she said, they usually don’t notice right-wing arguments until they spread to the […]
When President Clinton sat down in front of U.S. television cameras to explain “why the U.S. is leading the international effort to restore democratic government in Haiti” (10/16/94), he emphasized the violation of Haitian women’s human rights. “International observers uncovered a terrifying pattern of soldiers and policemen raping the wives and daughters of suspected political […]
