FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
The much-retweeted Twitter complaint that “no media has covered” the Beirut bombing is wrong. But Max Fisher’s argument—that it’s wrong to blame media for the fact that “the world truly does care more about France”—is equally absurd.
Just as the question of Al-Qaeda’s motives in 2001 provoked more self-congratulation than serious inquiry, coverage of Paris in 2015 tended to skirt over political realities.
The AP published a thrilling account of how the FBI, in concert with Moldovan authorities, “disrupted” a smuggling ring that was supposedly trying to sell “nuclear material” to ISIS. The problem: At no point does AP’s reporting show that anyone connected to the scheme had any connection to ISIS.
On the Monday before the Independence Day weekend, several mainstream media outlets repeated the latest press release by the FBI that the country was under a new “heightened terror alert” from “ISIL-inspired attacks” “leading up to the July 4 weekend.” Former CIA director (and consultant at DC PR firm Beacon Global Strategies) Michael Morell went […]
A White Supremacist Killer is Less a ‘Terrorist’ Than Persons Unknown; Non-Muslim Terrorists a Surprise – to Consumers of Corporate Media; Reporting Fast Track’s Victory From the Corporate Lobbyist Perspective; When Political Violence Comes From ‘White People Like Ourselves’; Greece’s Brutal Austerity Isn’t Enough for WaPo; Who Knew? George Will Believes in Recycling
It’s true, as CNN’s Anderson Cooper says, that most depressed people, and people with mental illness in general, will never hurt anyone. But it’s just as true that religious beliefs–“extremist” or otherwise–don’t “lead most people to kill other people.”
The holiday weekend came and went, with the FBI “terror warning” hyped by the media foreshadowing nothing more than for two false alarms and a handful of canceled Fourth of July plans. So it was curious, to say the least, when on Thursday the FBI asserted that “a number” of “ISIS-inspired” terror plots had been “thwarted.”
A casual search reveals the FBI and DHS are a pitiful 0 for 40 warning of terror attacks—some of which were specifically about 4th of July threats, none of which materialized in any way.
in a piece all about the “mismatch between public perceptions and actual cases,” the entity most charged with matching sure these match–the news media–doesn’t get much scrutiny
Generally, news outlets don’t explain why they aren’t calling Roof a terrorist suspect–they just rarely use the word. But the Washington Post’s Philip Bump gave it a shot in a piece headlined “Why We Shouldn’t Call Dylann Roof a Terrorist.”
The day after the Boston Marathon bombing, 34 percent of newspaper stories used the word “terrorism.” With the Charleston church massacre, the comparable figure was 7 percent.
In a crime story that would be huge news if the perpetrator Muslims–rather than someone who hates Muslims–Robert Rankin Doggart was caught talking about wiping out a Muslim community in upstate New York.
Right on cue, the American media published dressed-up FBI press releases about the “disrupted” plot. These outlets, as usual, omitted the rather awkward fact that this “ISIS plot” did not actually involve anyone in ISIS.
Brian Gallagher, the editor of USA Today‘s editorial page, writes to those who responded to his paper’s February 2 cartoon (FAIR Blog, 2/3/15): Dear readers, I rarely respond to letter-writing campaigns, but I’ll take a moment to respond to this one because I think that FAIR’s glib analysis of the editorial cartoon published recently in […]
Every lone wolf terrorist has been Muslim, says the no spin Fox host.
Far from being a “new generation,” the toothpaste tube bomb has been around for almost four decades.
This week: Media cover right-wing domestic terrorism–without calling it terrorism. Plus CNN’s left/right discussion of Israeli occupation left a lot to be desired, and USA Today calls Walmart protesters “party poopers.” Watch:
Coverage of Las Vegas murders mostly failed to call the crimes “terrorism,” despite the alleged killers leaving behind a note that said “The revolution is beginning,”
Food stamp cuts are an encouraging sign of bipartisanship, according to some media accounts. And journalists are fascinated by the “real” Mitt Romney. Plus a domestic terror trial that’s not getting much press attention–perhaps because the terror suspects aren’t Muslims.
It’s hard not to think back on previous undercovered terrorism stories and conclude that if suspects in this story were Muslims, and their alleged targets Christians or Jews, it would have dominated our media world for the past several months.
