FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
Finding the May 21 New York Times article on unconvicted (often even uncharged) former Guantanamo prisoners supposedly “rejoining” terrorist groups “especially troubling” in that “it turns the truth upside-down,” Dan Kennedy (UTV, 6/9/09) explains how reporter Elisabeth “Bumiller’s story played into the darkest fears promoted by Cheney and his fellow conservatives by making it appear […]
[mp3-jplayer tracks=”CounterSpin060509 Fred Clarkson and Adam Serwer @https://eadn-wc04-3257648.nxedge.io/audio/counterspin/CounterSpin060509.mp3″] Download MP3 This week on CounterSpin: There’s been a lot of coverage of the murder of Dr. George Tiller, allegedly killed by and anti-abortion activist. But there has been relatively little discussion of the culture that such violence arises from, where mainstream anti-abortion figures regularly demonize abortion […]
Attempting to add appropriate context to mainstream reportage of Sunday’s murder of Kansas doctor George Tiller, the Media Justice Fund blog has reprinted (6/1/09) an October 8, 2006, Women In Media & News post by Jennifer Pozner titled “The Terrorists Who Aren’t in the News: Anti-Abortion Fanatics Spread Fear by Bombings, Murders and Assaults, but […]
Noticing how “in the past week, Republican politicians and pundits have been striving mightily to invoke fear in the hearts of the American people,” News Corpse blogger Mark Howard has collected (5/25/09) some choice quotes from GOP members “blanketing the airwaves with assertions that President Obama’s policies on national security (Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantanamo, torture, etc.) […]
Remembering all too well how the New York Times “helped sell the Iraq War with a bogus story about aluminum tubes for nuclear centrifuges and withheld evidence of illegal spying on Americans for more than a year,” Consortium News editor Robert Parry (5/21/09) tells how the paper “is again mishandling a sensitive story in a […]
Salon‘s Glenn Greenwald (5/19/09, ad-viewing required) “gives the lie to the collective national claim that we learned our lesson and are now regretful about the Bush/Cheney approach to terrorism”: Republicans are right about the fact that while it was Bush officials who led the way in implementing these radical and lawless policies, most of the […]
Download MP3 This week on CounterSpin: Sick Around America, the recently aired documentary on PBS‘s Frontline purported to ask why the US can’t finance universal health care the way other developed countries do. But the picture was at best incomplete, since it seems some options were considered off the table. We’ll hear from reporter and […]
Posting his letter to the New York Times on FAIR Blog, FAIR activist bpb points out that not only is Thomas Friedman claiming that terrorism works, he’s making up evidence to claim that terrorism works: There is no evidence for Thomas Friedman’s contention that after Israel’s 2006 war with Hizballah, “Lebanese civilians, in anguish, said […]
In the wake of NY Times foreign affairs columnist Thomas Friedman’s call today for terrorism against Palestinian civilians in Gaza, a new FAIR Action Alert is calling on the Times to clarify whether this column meets the paper’s standards. You can post copies of your letters to the New York Times in the comments section […]
[mp3-jplayer tracks=”CounterSpin112108 Kai Wright and Andy Worthington @https://eadn-wc04-3257648.nxedge.io/audio/counterspin/CounterSpin112108.mp3″] Download MP3 This week on CounterSpin: The victory of Proposition 8 in California has, at least for the moment, put the brakes on gay marriage in that state. The post-election recriminations are flying, but the main story we’re hearing is that black voters turned out in droves—to […]
On May 13, 2004, a novel euphemism was delivered into the public lexicon by anonymous “counterintelligence official” sources cited in a New York Times article. The piece reported the CIA had been using “a technique known as ‘water boarding,’ in which a prisoner is strapped down, forcibly pushed under water and made to believe he […]
I’m not in a position to speak for or about other American reporters or newspapers that have written about the Tri-Border Area (TBA) and its ties to Islamic extremist groups. But since April Howard and Benjamin Dangl refer to one of my articles (New York Times, 12/15/02) in the oh-so-snide first paragraph of their report […]
After years of paying scant attention to Somalia, U.S. media suddenly rediscovered the war-torn African nation in 2006 when a coalition of Islamic courts and their affiliated militias imposed peace on feuding warlords and began enforcing religious law. A U.S.-backed Ethiopian invasion soon loomed, and the Bush administration made the preferred story line clear. “The […]
This week on CounterSpin: Journalist Nomi Prins joins to explain the current turmoil in the housing market. Also on the show: A discussion on “The Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act,” with Kamau Karl Franklin of Center for Constitutional Rights.
Does the current media frenzy surrounding Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad distract from more important matters—like whether the U.S. is planning military action against Iran? We’ll speak with Baruch College history professor Ervand Abrahamian. Also on the show: A discussion on Al Qaeda and Iraq with Andrew Tilghman, former Stars & Stripes reporter and author of the Washington Monthly report “The Myth of Al Qaeda in Iraq.”
When we arrived in Ciudad del Este, we were petrified. After all, we were in the Paraguayan city known in the American press as a “Jungle Hub for World’s Outlaws” (L.A. Times, 8/24/98), and a “hotbed” “teeming with Islamic extremists and their sympathizers” (New York Times, 12/15/02). The U.S. media’s portrayal of this city, the […]
After the August 7 Democratic debate, MSNBC reporter David Shuster weighed in with what the cable channel called a “truth squad” segment, ostensibly intended to fact check various claims by the candidates. But the result had less to do with clarifying the facts than with protecting Bush from harsh criticism. In concluding his report, Shuster […]
Mainstream media were all together in cheering the Bush White House’s renewed commitment to fighting AIDS. The only trouble was, the key numbers at the center of the conversation turn out to be not as they appear.
With the public still many months away from choosing presidential candidates from either major party, the media have fallen into a familiar pattern of trying to “weed out” candidates that do not meet the press corps’ ideological standards (Extra!, 9-10/03). This tendency usually applies more to Democrats than Republicans—but Rep. Ron Paul (R. Texas) has […]
Fox News Channel‘s Bill O’Reilly and CBS talk show host David Letterman had a well-publicized showdown on Letterman’s program in early January, so it came as no surprise that their next face-to-face on October 27 would be similarly heated. After the interview aired, O’Reilly accused Letterman of dishonesty for accurately saying O’Reilly had lied on […]
