FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
An article in the new issue ofNewsweek (10/24/11)–“Obama’s Big Green Mess: How the White House lost its Eco-Mojo”–presents White House policy as a series of failures. It starts off with federal inspectors finding serious problems with various weatherization projects. That’s just the tip of the iceberg–from Solyndra to stimulus, things aren’t looking good. But writers […]
On last night’s Fox show (6/23/11), O’Reilly gave viewers a lesson in… well, something: So why is this happening? Well, it all boils down to political philosophy. President Obama is a liberal guy who believes the feds should run the economic show, and he hired advisers who believe that as well. The administration then set […]
Noting that “Republicans and their adjunct outlets have been touting one specific lie above all others lately”–that of a fictitious “$8 billion earmark in the stimulus package to build a high-speed rail connector between Las Vegas and Disneyland”–Political Animal blogger Steve Benen reports (WashingtonMonthly.com, 3/3/09) that “yesterday, Fox News gave the story a twist, changing […]
Having already caught “the infamous GOP talking point that the stimulus package contains gobs of cash for saving marsh mice” having “found its way into a New York Times story, without the paper mentioning that the claim is untrue,” blogger Greg Sargent (Plum Line, 2/24/09) now finds that “earlier drafts of the story did describe […]
Free Press has some good news (2/17/09) about the “$7.2 billion to expand broadband access” contained in President Obama’s new American Reinvestment and Recovery Act: The law attaches open Internet conditions to broadband funds and directs the Federal Communications Commission to produce a national broadband plan. The National Telecommunications and Information Administration will distribute the […]
You see it all the time: You need 60 votes to pass a bill in the Senate. Not exactly. Under Senate rules—which can be changed by a majority vote—you need the consent of 3/5ths of the Senate to close debate on an issue; that’s 60 votes. To pass a bill, you need a majority of […]
There’s been a corporate media trope lately that the stimulus bill, despite Barack Obama’s assurances, contains “pork.” It’s not always clear what “pork” means, but the Washington Post today (2/13/09) had an example of the genre–headlined “Despite Pledges, Stimulus Has Some Pork”–that opens with a definition of what it means by the term. Unfortunately, it’s […]
There’s a trope that you often see in corporate media discussions of the stimulus plan: Yeah, but do you really want to spend money on that? It may have started with the misrepresented contraceptive plan—which seemed to be grounded in a traditional media fascination/embarrassment at anything involving sex—but now it’s moved on to anything that…well, […]
Attacking the White House’s proposed economic stimulus plan (1/26/09), Rush Limbaugh explained that the issue pits his favored “supply-siders,” who see the holy grail in tax cuts, against what he repeatedly referred to as, at least what sounded like “kineesian economists,” who he described as partial to “government spending on shovel-ready projects of all kinds.” […]
New York Times columnist Paul Krugman helpfully debunks (1/26/09) some of the more tendentious and misleading criticisms of the White House’s economic stimulus package. Here’s one such trope: First, there’s the bogus talking point that the Obama plan will cost $275,000 per job created. Why is it bogus? Because it involves taking the cost of […]
