FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
Even as the devastation resulting from humanity’s ongoing alteration of the Earth’s atmosphere became more and more obvious, coverage of the 2012 presidential election campaign seemed completely impervious to the effects of climate change.
The New York Times reported (10/6/09) that the Federal Trade Commission was planning to establish new rules for bloggers: The FTC said that beginning on December 1, bloggers who review products must disclose any connection with advertisers, including, in most cases, the receipt of free products and whether or not they were paid in any […]
New York Times media reporter Tim Arango has a story (5/20/09) on one very serious repercussion from shrinking corporate news outlets: Opponents of the death penalty looking to exonerate wrongly accused prisoners say their efforts have been hobbled by the dwindling size of America’s newsrooms, and particularly the disappearance of investigative reporting at many regional […]
Imagine that the United States government was under attack from a foreign power that organized a guerrilla army to attack ordinary civilians, killing tens of thousands. And suppose that opposition politicians and media outlets in the U.S. were obviously and in some cases openly receiving support from that same foreign power. Now imagine, difficult as […]
Why do you need media critics when you’ve got Bob Dole? In the final weeks of the campaign, as Dole groped for some theme that would prevent him from being buried under a Clinton landslide, the Republican candidate hit on his party’s favorite imaginary enemy: the “liberal” media. At campaign stop after campaign stop, Dole […]
Before we can talk about the media’s attitude toward Bill Clinton, we need to understand what the media are. Nearly every major news outlet in the United States is owned by a large for-profit corporation—whether a media conglomerate like Time Warner or Disney or a diversified industrial giant like General Electric (which owns NBC) or […]
The jockeying by presidential candidates to win the support of pundits and funders is known as the “first primary.” Bill Clinton won that primary by presenting himself as the kind of centrist politician that political insiders are comfortable with: tough on foreign policy, skeptical of social programs, friendly toward business. In the real election, Clinton […]
The question is not whether the media were unfair to George Bush, or whether the media were unfair to Bill Clinton. The question the media have to ask themselves is whether they were fair to the American people. After 1988, an election year dominated by non-issues, deceptive attacks, substanceless one-liners and photo opportunities, the media […]
