FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
Brad Jacobson is resurrecting the “NYT Front|Back” feature of his Media Bloodhound blog (7/10/09)–spotlighting the New York Times‘ “penchant for placing a supremely unnewsworthy story on its cover while burying a vital one in its back pages”–only for “the most egregious and absurd examples.” The current example being their July 7 front-page headliner, “In Sex […]
Salon‘s Glenn Greenwald has an update (7/2/09, ad-viewing required) on “several noteworthy developments since I wrote on Tuesday about the refusal of NPR‘s ombudsman, Alicia Shepard, to be interviewed by me about NPR‘s ban on using the word ‘torture’ to describe the Bush administration’s interrogation tactics”: Given the utter vapidity of her rationale (“there are […]
Deeming “the battle against baseless, worthless grants of anonymity by journalists” to be “at this point, probably futile,” Salon‘s Glenn Greenwald (6/15/09, ad-viewing required) is exasperated to see how “even many of the nation’s best and most valuable reporters–such as the New Yorker‘s Jane Mayer–seem helplessly addicted to it.” Greenwald points to “an otherwise solid […]
Citing a FAIR Action Alert (5/27/09), New York Times ombud Clark Hoyt agreed with media activists who asked him to challenge the Times‘ unskeptical coverage of a leaked Pentagon report on former Guantánamo prisoners. In his column “What Happened to Skepticism?” (6/6/09), Hoyt called the Times‘ May 21 front-page story on the report “seriously flawed.” […]
In a Smirking Chimp piece (5/29/09) averring that “Everyone Should See Torturing Democracy“–the delayed documentary that “recounts how the Bush White House and the Pentagon decided to make coercive detention and abusive interrogation the official U.S. policy” and “also credits the brave few who stood up to those in power”–PBS‘ Bill Moyers spells out the […]
“Dick Cheney seems to be everywhere,” declared ABC News correspondent Jonathan Karl (World News, 5/13/09), calling the formerly reclusive former vice president “the most visible Republican in the country these days.” Cheney has been hard to miss. Since leaving office in January, in addition to broad coverage of his May 21 speech at the American […]
Robert Parry (Consortium News, 5/25/09) thinks that “there is no one, it seems, that the U.S. mainstream news media loves more than Colin Powell,” and as proof offers “Powell’s disingenuous response” to Bob Schieffer’s May 24 CBS Face the Nation “question about the ex-secretary of state’s knowledge regarding ‘enhanced interrogation techniques,’ which the International Committee […]
While former Vice President Dick Cheney has been front and center in the media debate over the current White House’s national security policies, he’s not the only one trying to challenge the White House’s message. The New York Times published a front-page article (5/21/09) that bolstered the notion that former Guantánamo prisoners “return” to terrorist […]
Wondering “why NPR decided it was appropriate to present Cheney’s blatantly self-serving propaganda as anything remotely relevant to current policy,” NPR Check contributor Brian (5/23/09) blogs about current president Barack Obama and former vice president Dick Cheney recently “attacking the policies of the other administration and defending their own positions in speeches.” Even though each […]
Amy Goodman recently interviewed independent journalist Jeremy Scahill on her Democracy Now! show (5/19/09) regarding the fact that, in Scahill’s words, “while much of the focus has been on the tactical use of torture at Guantanamo, almost no attention had been paid to a parallel force” known as the Immediate Reaction Force. Describing the methods […]
The independent website Raw Story (5/6/09) recently summarized the human toll of the U.S. government’s torture program. Approximately 100 prisoners have died in U.S. custody in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to human rights investigators, with 34 of those deaths officially classified as homicides; at least eight individuals were tortured to death. Yet somehow, when corporate […]
Download MP3 This week on CounterSpin: Climate change legislation is making its way through Congress, but weirdly, that might not be good news. Some environmentalists are saying that in this case, no law might be better than this bill–that started out as a call to reduce carbon emissions but seems to be turning into something […]
When influential institutions treat those responsible for torture as worthy experts, society risks losing things even more valuable than “thoughtful conversation.”
The debate over Bush-era torture tactics like waterboarding has morphed into a full-blown Washington scandal. But the target isn’t the Bush administration officials who ordered the torture; instead, the corporate media’s focus is on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who claims that she was not fully briefed by the CIA on the use of waterboarding in […]
Quoting Sen. Lindsey Graham’s statement at a May 13 Senate hearing that “one of the reasons these techniques have been used for about 500 years is that they work,” Robert Parry (Consortium News, 5/16/09) explains that this is “implicitly endorsing the Spanish Inquisition’s brutal treatment of Jews, Muslims, Protestants and other alleged heretics from the […]
Giving us a glimpse at “a large part of what was left on the editor’s floor” from his On the Media NPR interview, Harpers.org‘s Scott Horton (5/12/09) writes of “the New York Times and its history of dealing with the word ‘torture’”: I noted that in the pre-Bush era, the Times had absolutely no compunction […]
Blogger and Philadelphia Inquirer writer Will Bunch has a review (Attytood, 5/11/09) of how, “by late last year, the world already knew a great deal about John Yoo, the Philadelphia native and conservative legal scholar whose tenure in the Bush administration as a top Justice Department lawyer lies at the root of the period of […]
Hearing “the whining retreat of a whipped pup instead of the toothy growl of a watchdog,” the Colorado Independent‘s John Tomasic (5/11/09) quotes Washington Post reporter Paul Kane answering an online question with a new excuse for refusing to “call waterboarding people and slamming them into walls torture”–“because [the Post] fears a lawsuit for libel”: […]
Noticing how PBS‘s Gwen Ifill has a penchant for “filling her Washington Week program with journalists who almost invariably agree with each other instead of actually debating the issues of the week,” critic Charles Kaiser decided to contact her (CJR.org, 5/8/09) about a recent “discussion of torture in which the only issue the panelists identified […]
Salon blogger Glenn Greenwald gets the site’s lead story today (5/8/09, ad-viewing required) with an excerpt from the New York Times obituary for U.S. fighter pilot Harold E. Fischer Jr., who, as the Times headline puts it, was “Tortured in a Chinese Prison.” Greenwald deems such naming of Fischer’s ordeal–“kept in a dark, damp cell […]
