FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
Corporate media’s preference for”centrism” canoftentranslate intoreporting that casts two sides of a debate as equally belligerent or unwilling to compromise. ABC reporter Jonathan Karl‘s report yesterday on This Week (4/3/11) offers a perfect example of the absurdity of this worldview. His focuses was on the battle over the federal budget. On one side are Tea […]
I was struck by how much coverage yesterday’srather small-looking Tea Party rally in Washington got in the national media. Slate‘s Dave Weigel has a piece(3/31/11) explaining that the event wasn’t as “extreme asDemocrats would like it to be,” as the subhead says. But the movement’salso not nearly as popular as the media coverage would lead […]
It’s normal for the opposition party to deliver a rebuttal address to the State of the Union. Last night Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin was given that responsibility. But further-to-the-right Rep. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota delivered the “Tea Party” response to the State of the Union, which was initially scheduled to air on the Tea […]
New York Times reporter Matt Bai had a long piece Sunday (10/31/10)that argued that Tea Partiers are really the right-wing version of Bush-era MoveOn activists and bloggers (the “netroots”). Bai writes of “the larger forces that unify many self-styled activists on both the left and right,” and suggests that “the recent uprisings on both ends […]
Amy Gardner’srecent reporting on the Tea Party in the Washington Post has been very insightful. Today’s piece (10/27/10) deals with the activists’ views of the media.There’s astandard right-wing whine about mainstream media neglect, but actual Tea Party activists see things differently: Most local tea party organizers interviewed in an extensive canvass this month by the […]
Jodi Jacobson from RH Reality Check joins CounterSpin this week to talk about the media’s decision to let Tea Party activists define their movement as one that doesn’t focus on red meat “social issues.” As Jacobson argues, that distinction doesn’t really square with the far-right views espoused by leading Tea Party Republican candidates. The New […]
The New York Times‘ David Carr (9/20/10) compares involvement by media figures in politics–exemplified by CNBC‘s Rick Santelli and various Fox News figures fueling the Tea Party movement, and Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert’s dueling answer rallies to said movement–to “a football game where the reporters and commentators, bored by the feckless proceedings on the […]
Applebaum seems, like many journalists, to believe that the Tea Party protesters are pretty much like Perot voters.
E.J. Dionne has a good column in the Washington Post today (4/19/10) looking at the Tea Party movement, and pinning a fair amount of blame on the press: “The news media’s incessant focus on the Tea Party is creating a badly distorted picture of what most Americans think and is warping our policy debates.” Looking […]
From his Web column today (4/16/10): After initially dismissing the tea types as an unimportant sideshow, the media are drinking deeply from that particular cup, especially with today being Tax Day and all. If by “dismissing” Kurtz means “featuring on the network evening newscasts,” he might have a point–since that’s how last year’s Tea Party […]
Like Andrew Malcolm (FAIR Blog, 4/6/10), Bill O’Reilly (O’Reilly Factor, 4/5/10) has a bone to pick with how the “left-wing media” have representing the Tea Party movement. First, he complained, “Tea Party folks were labeled stupid, too dumb to understand complicated issues.” Then the media said that “many Tea Party people are racist and far-right […]
Is theTea Party movement actually more politically diverse than the “liberal media” would have you believe? Andrew Malcolm, a blogger for the L.A. Times who used to be Laura Bush’s press secretary, thinks so. He wrote yesterday (4/5/10) about a pair of polls that came out about the Tea Party movement: For upwards of 12 […]
Blogger Matthew Yglesias (2/9/10), responding to a Des Moines Register poll that found “a third of Iowans from across the political spectrum say they support the ‘tea party’ movement, sounding a loud chorus of dissatisfaction with government”: Thirty-eight percent of Americans have a favorable view of Cuba and 36 percent are favorably disposed toward socialism, […]
In citing how Talking Points Memo creator Josh Marshall “has talked many times about the ways in which the Washington establishment is ‘wired for the GOP,’” Steve Benen (Political Animal, 9/13/09) notes that “the Washington Post offers a helpful example today”–as posted on Media Matters: “Behold the media’s glaring double standard. Today, the Post puts […]
Just one highlight in Brad Jacobson’s wide-ranging interview of Editor & Publisher‘s Greg Mitchell (Media Bloodhound, 5/5/09) is Mitchell’s scorn for “media coverage of the anti-tax tea parties”: Greg Mitchell: Most amazing was that they tended to treat it like protests in the past. There have been national abortion rights protests and immigration rights protests […]
A nice round-up from TVNewser of the evening newscasts. Will conservatives ever catch abreak from the left-wing media? How The Evening Newscasts Covered the Tea Parties NBC Nightly News led with two stories on tax day. Lee Cowan reported on the tea parties while Savannah Guthrie reported on the White House message of middle-class tax […]
With all the fuss about tea parties today, it’s worth noting again that the original Boston tea party was not, as is often claimed, a protest against the British imposing a tax on tea. What the colonists were actually objecting to was the British lowering the tax on tea in order to favor the East […]
With Fox News Channel relentlessly promoting—and MSNBC mostly mocking—the right-wing “tea party” demonstrations around the country today, middle-of-the-road media critics are making a typically middle-of-the-road complaint: Yes, Fox shouldn’t be sponsoring such events, but the rest of the corporate media shouldn’t just ignore these allegedly newsworthy events. As Howard Kurtz put it in the Washington […]
