FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
Once the shooter was identified as Omar Mateen, a US citizen of Afghan descent, the narrative changed. After this South Asian ethnicity was revealed, news media began calling the attack an act of terror.
During NPR’s national coverage of the horrific shooting in Orlando, NPR “counter-terrorism correspondent” Dina Temple-Raston made a critical false claim that deserves an on-air correction.
If terrorists had set out to conduct a controlled experiment on how the US media covers mass deaths overseas, they couldn’t have planned it any better than to have the Ankara bombing followed by the Brussels attack.
Some journalists have written excellent, thoughtful articles, and some have wasted wood pulp and bandwidth. Most early reporting sat between those extremes.
Of all extremist groups, the far right is consistently given the kindest news coverage in US corporate media. This weekend, the world witnessed a prime example of such friendly treatment in action. Armed far-right anti-government militants occupied a federal building in Oregon late on January 2 and announced they would remain there indefinitely. Although the […]
The San Bernardino killings have added fuel to an upsurge of Islamophobia in US media and politics that in some ways is worse than that seen in the wake of September 11, 2001.
“In the aftermath of the Planned Parenthood attacks…not only did the Christian right not take any responsibility, we saw several of the people in that community actually egg on perpetrators of violence.”
“Framing the problem of political violence as a struggle of ‘us’ against ‘ them,’ of creating a demonized other by stoking fear, is a tried and true strategy for building an audience.”
None of CNN’s moderators, nor any of the nine candidates, mentioned the very real threat posed by white political violence.
it’s no surprise that the Planned Parenthood videos used the same bag of tricks that James O’Keefe had employed to such success: deceptive editing, false framing, misrepresented visuals. And it’s also not a surprise that corporate media—concerned about seeming “clueless” but even more worried about appearing “partisan”—gave plentiful newshole to their claims,
A “bottomless season of nastiness, racist hate-mongering and war fever” has swept through much of the media and political sphere in the wake of the San Bernardino massacre.
“It was very striking, when we went back and looked at the coverage, how the media were blaming Russia for having ISIS blow up one of its planes.”
It does no dishonor to those killed in Paris last month to acknowledge the ISIS attacks were not “the deadliest violence to strike France since World War II.”
If media’s takeaway from the violent murders of three people at a Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood clinic, by a man reportedly ranting about “baby parts,” is that “both sides” need to tone down their rhetoric, then women and women’s reproductive rights will be taking a step backward.
Many were taken aback to read the New York Times‘ summary of what its team of reporters gleaned from interviewing neighbors of the man arrested for murdering three people at a Colorado Springs women’s health clinic: Acquaintances described Robert L. Dear Jr., who was arrested in a fatal rampage at a Planned Parenthood center in […]
CNN guest Michael Scheuer’s proudly sociopathic views should come as no surprise.
In the wake of the Paris attacks 10 days ago, much of the media have needlessly stoked fears and acted, entirely predictably, as the PR wing for terrorists.
The Paris attacks by the group known as ISIS have dominated news outlets, but if the goal really is to prevent the recurrence of such violence, then reporting that eliminates political context can’t be the way forward.
It’s tempting to argue that it’s natural for the US news media to have more concern for Paris because those attacks hit closer to home–except for one thing: More Americans were killed in last week’s Beirut bombings than in Paris — yet only a handful of US papers even bothered to mention them.
Because Russia’s government is considered an enemy of Washington, US media express skepticism about its interest in increasing its powers, suspecting it might have its own self-interest rather than the safety of its citizens foremost in mind.
