FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
Glenn Beck (7/25/11, via Mediaite, 7/25/11) explains on his radio show why the right-wing Norway terror suspect is what we call left-wing here in America: This was one of the episodes where I showed the railroad tracks that were different than America. In America, the left railroad track is gigantic government—it could be Communist or […]
Right-wing terror suspect Anders Behring Breivik reportedly killed 76 people in Norway on Friday, by all accounts driven by far-right anti-immigrant politics and fervent Islamophobia. But many early media accounts assumed that the perpetrator of the attacks was Muslim. On news of the first round of attacks—the bombs in Oslo—CNN‘s Tom Lister (7/22/11) didn’t know […]
Glenn Beck’s temporary replacement in the 5 p.m. slot on Fox News, Eric Bolling, has started out with a bang. On the July 13 edition of his new show the Five, the host declared: “America was certainly safe between 2000 and 2008. I don’t remember any attacks on American soil during that period of time.” […]
[mp3-jplayer tracks=”CounterSpin061711 Shahid Buttar and Gareth Porter @https://eadn-wc04-3257648.nxedge.io/audio/counterspin/CounterSpin061711.mp3″] Download MP3 This week on CounterSpin: An activist in Texas gets his FBI files—and finds out that agents have been tailing him for years. Activists in the Midwest are the targets of a wide-ranging investigation, including a half-dozen house raids and an array of subpoenas. And—oh yeah—parts […]
According to Tim Dickinson’s new piece in Rolling Stone, Fox honcho Roger Ailes lives in fear of “those gays”: Murdoch installed Ailes in the corner office on Fox‘s second floor at 1211 Avenue of the Americas in Manhattan. The location made Ailes queasy: It was close to the street, and he lived in fear that […]
[mp3-jplayer tracks=”CounterSpin050611 Matthew Alexander and Tyson Slocum @https://eadn-wc04-3257648.nxedge.io/audio/counterspin/CounterSpin050611.mp3″] Download MP3 This week on CounterSpin: The killing of Osama bin Laden has delivered plenty of media themes: Can the U.S. trust Pakistan? What does this mean for Al Qaeda? And, predictably enough, did Bush-era torture help find the al Qaeda leader? Torture advocates’ insistence that this […]
On the morning of January 17 in Spokane, Washington, city workers found a backpack with a bomb that was set to go off along the route of the Martin Luther King Jr. Day parade. An FBI official (Spokane Spokesman Review, 1/19/11) called the bomb “a viable device that was very lethal and had the potential […]
[mp3-jplayer tracks=”CounterSpin Andy Worthington Lucinda Marshall @https://eadn-wc04-3257648.nxedge.io/audio/counterspin/CounterSpin042911.mp3″] Download MP3 This week on CounterSpin: If you’ve heard much at all about WikiLeaks new disclosures about Guantánamo, you’ve probably noticed that US media tend to emphasize information justifying and rationalizing the U.S. actions regarding its offshore prison camp. But what should listeners really know about the new […]
[mp3-jplayer tracks=”CounterSpin032511 Asli Bali and Alia Malek @https://eadn-wc04-3257648.nxedge.io/audio/counterspin/CounterSpin032511.mp3″] Download MP3 This week on CounterSpin: The U.S.’s sudden military involvement in Libya raises many questions that have not been answered by officials who’ve plunged the country into a war they say is to protect civilians, or even asked by many journalists who have been too busy […]
A recent Wall Street Journal editorial (3/11/11) defended the Peter King hearings on Islamist terrorism against “our friends on the left [who] are busy portraying them as the McCarthy hearings and Palmer Raids rolled into one.” The editors argued that in fact, the focus on Muslims is justified based on the facts: Since 9/11, there […]
To make his claim that the right hasn’t been responsible for a terrorist act since 1995, O’Reilly even had to overlook at least two domestic terror acts apparently inspired by his Fox News colleague Glenn Beck.
Today the New York Times reports that an arrest has been made in connection with an attempted bombing at the Martin Luther King Day parade in Spokane, Washington. As we pointed out here, the case has generated relatively little media coverage–in contrast to attempted domestic terrorism attacks (or even alleged plots) connected to Muslims. The […]
Someone wanted to set off a bomb at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Day parade in Spokane, Washington. Luckily the suspicious bag holding the bomb was spotted,which likelysaved lives. As the Washington Post reported today: “The device appeared to be operational, it appeared to be deadly, and it was intended to inflict multiple casualties,” said […]
[mp3-jplayer tracks=”CounterSpin011411 Chip Berlet and Ladd Everitt @https://eadn-wc04-3257648.nxedge.io/audio/counterspin/CounterSpin011411.mp3″] Download MP3 This week on CounterSpin: What do we know about alleged Tucson killer Jared Lee Loughner’s world view, which has been described as rambling, incoherent and non political in various news media reports? And what of the right-wing backlash attacking anyone who even suggests that vitriolic […]
That George W. Bush kept America safer from terrorism than Barack Obama is a conservative article of faith these days—and corporate media seem little inclined to challenge the blatant falsehoods used to advance this childish GOP talking point. The most prominent example came on Good Morning America (ABC, 1/8/10) during a discussion of the failed […]
When Abdelbasset Al-Megrahi, after serving 10 years of a life sentence for allegedly blowing up the Pan Am 103 airliner over Lockerbie, Scotland in 1988, was granted compassionate release due to terminal illness, the ensuing controversy was loud and indignant. Al-Megrahi, a former Libyan intelligence officer, returned home to what was angrily described in U.S. […]
Download MP3 This week on CounterSpin: A few months ago it seemed like Dick Cheney wouldn’t get off your television screen, insisting that secret CIA documents would prove that Bush torture policies saved the United States from further terrorist attacks. Well those documents have surfaced, along with a 2004 CIA inspector general’s report. So what’s […]
Salon‘s Glenn Greenwald (7/9/09, ad-viewing required) is extolling “The Significance of McClatchy‘s Act of Journalism” when reporting that recently released six-year Guantanamo prisoner Haji Sahib Rohullah Wakil–one of many who supposedly “returned to or are suspected of returning to terrorism after their release”–“far from being in hiding, operates openly among officials of Afghanistan’s U.S.-allied government.” […]
The folks at Fox News, so quick to denounce dissent as unpatriotic during the George W. Bush era, have now moved from generally hoping for the failure of the Obama government to wishing another September 11 upon a country too slow to violence for their taste. Mark Howard of News Corpse (7/1/09) gives us video […]
