FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
Big news in the New York Times today (1/21/11): According to their new poll, Americans overwhelmingly support slashing military spending. Wait–that’s not the news. According to the story by Jackie Calmes and Dalia Sussman (headlined “Poll Finds Willingness to Cut Spending, Just Not Medicare or Social Security”), the real story is that people don’t like […]
In a column (12/19/10) devoted to attacking others for “the intentional manipulations of language to obscure truth,” Washington Post columnist and CNN host Kathleen Parker spends most of her time targeting Democrats over the tax cut debate: Democrats are equally guilty of obfuscation through language distortion. How many times throughout the tax bill debate have […]
On yesterday’s Chris Matthews show on NBC, the assembled journalists all seem to agree that Barack Obama’s decision to cut a tax deal with Republicans and come out swinging against the left was great news. Time‘s Mike Duffy: “These liberals may scream, but they’ve been screaming about Barack Obama since the beginning. This isn’t anything […]
The Dean is happy. Washington Post columnist and “dean” of the Beltwaypress corps David Broder was one of the few people (not counting Republicans) who stood up to applaud Barack Obama’s tax deal. Under the I-am-not-making-this-up headline “Centrist on the Rise,” Broder (12/9/10) congratulated Obama, who has”separated himself from the left of his own party […]
CNBC‘s Erin Burnett discussing the tax deal on the Today show yesterday (12/7/10): “With capital gains and dividend taxes staying low, the half of Americans that own stocks get a benefit there as well.” Oh, really? Here’s some figures from the Center on Budget & Policy Priorities (1/30/06): Over half—54 percent—of all capital gains and […]
The Los Angeles Times reports today (11/16/10) that Barack Obama might give a tax break to the wealthy after all: Obama has loosened his longstanding view that tax cuts should be extended permanently only for households earning less than $250,000 a year ($200,000 for singles). When a reporter suggests that a politician has “loosened” his […]
Reporting on the proposal from debt commission chairs Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles, a New York Times article (11/11/10) by Jackie Calmes framed the discussion this way: Mr. Obama created the commission last February in the hope it would provide political cover for bold action against deficits in 2011. His stance now, in the wake […]
In his Washington Post column yesterday (10/10/10), George Will offered the kind of analysis one has come to expect from George Will: Today, Barack Obama, a chronic campaigner, is out and about trying to arouse the masses against the inequity of not raising taxes on “the rich.” He opposes extending the Bush tax rates–they are […]
On Wednesday night’s broadcast of the PBS NewsHour (9/23/10), Gwen Ifill announced: “Now to the first of several conversations on whether or not to extend tax cuts that expire at the end of the year.” The first guest was Republican Glenn Hubbard, who Ifill told viewers “was the chair of the Council of Economic Advisers […]
An AP piece published across the Web today (9/16/10) carries this headline: AP-GfK Poll: Nearly Half Oppose Tax Hikes for Rich. Well, that’s one way of looking at it–just like you could report the results of the 1988 election by saying that Michael Dukakis got “nearly half” of the popular vote. The more logical way […]
There was something depressing about a recent discussion on the PBS NewsHour Monday night (9/13/10) about the debate over what to do with the Bush-era tax cuts. The politics of the tax debate is well-known; most Democrats want to extend them for all but the top brackets, while the Republicans want to renew the cuts […]
There’s a simple way of looking at the debate over the Bush tax cuts. The White House and most Democrats say they want to extend them for the vast majority of the population, but keep higher rates in place for families making over $250,000 a year. Republicans seem to know that “Keep Taxes Rates Low […]
The New York Times’ Jackie Calmes has a report today (4/15/10) about the brewing fight over the Bush tax cuts, which were passed for limited time period and will phase out if Congress does not pass legislation to extend them. The Obama White House will ask lawmakers to renew most of the tax cuts, but […]
Detroit Free Press columnist Mitch Albom—best known for his bestseller Tuesdays With Morrie—had a July 25 column that criticized the Obama healthcare reform with an argument that suggested an unfamiliarity with how the U.S. tax system works: In explaining why it was OK to sock a new 5.4 percent tax on the highest earners in […]
Reading Wall Street Journal reporter Gary Fields’ “point that a family making slightly over $250,000 doesn’t necessarily feel all that ‘rich’ when it comes to facing a tax hike from Barack Obama,” Matthew Yglesias (Think Progress, 4/17/09) dubs his story “The Not-So-Compelling Plight of the Somewhat Rich” and notes that “what the story doesn’t do […]
The roundtable on Sunday’s Meet the Press (2/1/09) sure didn’t look promising: Republican flat tax enthusiast Steve Forbes, former McCain economic adviser Mark Zandi and CNBC reporter Erin Burnett. It was Burnett, though, who delivered a head-scratching defense of the$18 billion bonuses recently doled out at Wall Street firms (many of which are still standing […]
Washington Post fact-checker Michael Dobbs weighs in (10/16/08) on last night’s debate—the headline more or less gives it away (“Both Campaigns Distorting Facts on Money Matters”). His first fact-check, though, hardly clears the air. Some of the sharpest back-and-forth over economic issues concerned the taxes that an Ohio plumber named Joe Wurzelbacher stands to pay […]
When a high-level government official calls for drastic changes in U.S. law, it ought to be big news. But in an interview reported by the Financial Times’ Amity Shlaes (5/19/01 & 5/22/01), treasury secretary Paul O’Neill called for sweeping changes in U.S. tax and social policy, and some three weeks later, those statements have made […]
Ever since George W. Bush proposed a $1.6 trillion tax cut, his critics have charged that the plan is a giveaway to the wealthy, while the Bush camp has insisted the plan is fair. So far, the media have covered the debate with surprising deference to the administration’s spin. U.S. News & World Report‘s February […]
The day after voters in King County, Washington, had apparently approved a plan to hike the local sales tax by a tenth of a percent to fund a new ballpark for the Seattle Mariners baseball team (9/20/95), the Seattle Times got right to the point with its banner headline: “Stadium Leads by 4,000 Votes.” A […]
