FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
The Washington Post’s headline “Trump’s Quick to Tweet on Terror and TV, Slower on Things Like the Attack in Portland,” was meant to call out Trump’s unwillingness to engage white supremacist violence, but it unwittingly illustrated the problem of elite media continuing to maintain separate spaces for extremist attacks based on who commits them.
The casual media observer was led to believe that a Georgia couple received lengthy prison sentences for simply showing up to a child’s birthday party waving flags.
while it’s important to lay primary blame for the Muslim travel ban at the feet of the man who signed it, years of Islamophobic coverage in corporate media—right-wing, centrist and “liberal”—laid the propaganda groundwork to get us here.
An attack on a Canadian mosque could have provided a critical lesson in the fallacy, and the danger, of singling out particular categories of people. That is, if US media had paid more than passing attention to the story.
Please contact CNN and tell the network to stop adopting the Trump administration’s “terror-prone” label as its own description of the countries targeted by Trump’s immigration order.
As a general rule, media outlets should not let the unilateral, unsubstantiated and self-serving claims of political leaders dictate how they frame such politically charged incidents.
As the Syrian government recaptured East Aleppo from rebels in recent weeks, media outlets from across the political spectrum became rebel mouthpieces, unquestioningly relaying rebel claims while omitting crucial details about who the rebels are.
Daily News columnist Gersh Kuntzman is doubling-down on his celebratory-but-not-celebratory-but-obviously-celebratory take on the December 19 murder of Russian Ambassador Andrei Karlov by an off-duty Turkish police officer.
But media don’t just cover terrorism, they engage in meta-terrorism—the terror that comes from the gratuitous or excessive coverage of stories that don’t actually involve terrorism, but rather potential or staged terrorism, or ISIS propaganda repackaged as news.
A review of topics mentioned and questions asked in the first three presidential/vice-presidential debates shows a significant emphasis on Russia, terrorism and taxes—pushing aside most other issues, including climate change, abortion, education, campaign finance and LGBTQ rights.
The possibility of other countries suing the US for war crimes its government commits is automatically assumed to be undesirable. But none of these publications were overly concerned with exposing the US to foreign lawsuits when they offered support for the Trans-Pacific Partnership.
Terrorism has become the hot horserace topic of the year in a way that goes beyond the silly to the potentially damaging. Something missing from these reports is any discussion of the relative danger of terrorism.
A survey conducted by FAIR of US media coverage of ISIS or ISIS-inspired attacks in Europe and the Middle East reveals a disparity of coverage, showing that European deaths are roughly 1,900 percent more newsworthy than deaths in the Middle East.
The New York Times provided no evidence that the presumed killer in Nice, France, was motivated by either politics or religion to commit violence–yet still labeled the murders as “terrorism,” as though the definition of that crime were based on ethnicity rather than motivation.
“You cannot use military force to wipe out terrorism. You can use military force to get rid of opposition military forces in a city somewhere, at enormous cost, as we’ve seen. But what happens is they then pop up somewhere else doing terrible things to a different population.”
Some might say the recent attacks claimed by ISIS in Baghdad, in Istanbul and in Medina are proof that the US should invest more in the so-called “War on Terror.” What will it take to turn the conversation away from the idea of bombing our way to peace and safety?
“The reason that we don’t have a good understanding of domestic violence and sexual violence and the role that those play in persistent misogyny and racism is, frankly, because we don’t have a very diverse media.”
We’re talking here about violence towards people of color, we’re talking about racism, we’re talking about transphobia, we’re talking about homophobia. These are all the systems that are creating constant violence in our communities every day.
Lack of curiosity about the influence of the violent far-right is a long tradition in US corporate media; don’t expect the murder of Jo Cox to change that.
While corporate media talked about “radical Islam,” others worked to maintain focus on the victims, with things like a short video from the group Familia: Trans Queer Liberation Movement, featuring people talking about the killings and other violence they face.
