FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
[mp3-jplayer tracks=”CounterSpin100909 Cyrus Safdari and Nomi Prins @https://eadn-wc04-3257648.nxedge.io/audio/counterspin/CounterSpin100909.mp3″] Download MP3 This week on CounterSpin: The story of Iran’s nuclear program certainly isn’t going away; glance at the newsstands this week and you might see the Newsweek cover story ‘After Iran Gets the Bomb.’ And a leaked report suggesting Iran is indeed pursuing nuclear weapons made […]
The selling of the Afghanistan War and the whitewashing of the Colombian military came together in a recent CBS Evening News report (7/27/09), a story so faithful to the U.S. propaganda lines that one might have mistaken it for state television. “U.S. forces are about to get some much-needed help as they fight the Taliban […]
You don’t expect to have to defend the position that the 175,000 residents of the small Pacific island your newspaper serves have a right to know about the brutal, nearly 40-year-long history of assault, rape and other crimes shadowing the 8,000 Marines set to be stationed in their backyard (Asia Times Online, 3/5/08). But that […]
The Weekly Standard, the country’s preeminent neoconservative magazine, was sold to Clarity Media Group, a Denver-based publishing group, for an undisclosed sum in June (Washington Examiner, 6/17/09). Rupert Murdoch’s unloading of the country’s most vigorously pro-war journal marks the end of a particularly sinister and regrettable era in the history of U.S. media. At a […]
The White House decision to send additional ground troops to Afghanistan (see Extra!, 4/09) is only part of the escalation of the war in Central Asia. The increased use of airstrikes and drone-fired missiles in both that country and neighboring Pakistan are likely to increase civilian deaths. Recent coverage, however, suggests that corporate media will […]
Download MP3 This week on CounterSpin: When the media talks foreign affairs, there’s generally an assumption that countries have identifiable interests and rationally pursue them as best they can. All that’s thrown out the window when it comes to North Korea. That country’s apparent decision to conduct an underground nuclear test and test-fire several missiles […]
On May 10, CBS‘s 60 Minutes presented a remarkably one-sided report on unmanned Air Force drones firing missiles into Afghanistan and Iraq. Though the drones have been criticized for killing civilians in both countries, CBS viewers heard from no critics of the weapons. Instead, correspondent Lara Logan seemed awed by the drones from the very […]
Early reports of a massive U.S. attack on civilians in western Afghanistan last week (5/5/09) hewed to a familiar corporate media formula, stressing official U.S. denials and framing the scores of dead civilians as a PR setback for the White House’s war effort. Scanning the headlines gave a sense of the media’s view of the […]
The wars that have wracked the Democratic Republic of the Congo since 1996, killing well over 5 million people (International Rescue Committee, 1/08) in what may be the deadliest conflict since World War II, are officially over. A peace agreement was signed in 2002, and general elections were held in 2006. But conflict and the […]
Download MP3 This week on CounterSpin: The White House’s proposed military budget comes to some $534 billion dollars, and that’s without including the costs of war in Iraq and Afghanistan. So why on earth are some saying Obama is “disarming America”. We’ll hear what this budget does and doesn’t do from Miriam Pemberton, research fellow […]
The three-week Israeli assault on the Gaza Strip that began December 27 was accompanied by aggressive public relations strategies intended to improve the assault’s portrayal in international media. “In the war of the pictures we lose, so you need to correct, explain or balance it in other ways,” said Israeli public affairs official Aviv Shir-On […]
“Afghanistan cannot be saved from the Taliban by military means alone” (Boston Globe, 1/5/09), goes a common corporate media line. “Force alone will not defeat the militants,” editorialized the New York Times (11/21/08). “Troops alone won’t do that job,” wrote Time’s Mark Thompson (3/2/09). With U.S. or allied forces responsible for 39 percent of the […]
Today’s New York Times features a piece by Thom Shanker that dwells on suspected budget cuts at the Pentagon. As the headline tells us, “After Stimulus Package, Pentagon Officials Are Preparing to Pare Back.” The piece gives little reason to believe that there are any such plans afoot; Obama did not campaign on cutting the […]
U.S. corporate media coverage of the Israeli military attacks launched December 27 that, as of January 13, had reportedly killed over 900 and injured thousands more—many of them civilians—has overwhelmingly failed to mention that indiscriminate attacks on civilian targets are illegal under international humanitarian law. Israel’s aerial attacks on Gazan infrastructure, including a TV station, […]
[mp3-jplayer tracks=”CounterSpin012309 Norman Solomon and Ann Jones @https://eadn-wc04-3257648.nxedge.io/audio/counterspin/CounterSpin012309.mp3″] Download MP3 This week on CounterSpin: The inauguration of President Barack Obama was undoubtedly historic, and was covered as such by the corporate media. But what are we to make of the idea that the media have gone gaga for Obama? And what are the pundits and […]
[mp3-jplayer tracks=”CounterSpin011609 Phyllis Bennis and Charles Kaiser @https://eadn-wc04-3257648.nxedge.io/audio/counterspin/CounterSpin011609.mp3″] Download MP3 This week on CounterSpin: Listeners have likely seen some horrific and affecting images from Gaza, where the death toll has exceeded an estimated 1,000 overwhelmingly Palestinian people as, as the New York Times had it, “the Israeli military operation continued apace.” We’ll hear from author […]
New York Times foreign affairs columnist Thomas Friedman endorsed terrorism in a January 14 column defending Israel’s attacks on the Gaza Strip. To answer his own question about Israel’s plan—”What is the goal?”—Friedman referred back to the 2006 attacks on Lebanon, which killed about 1,000 Lebanese civilians. To Friedman, this was the “education” of the […]
U.S. corporate media coverage of the Israeli military attacks that have reportedly killed over 900–many of them civilians–since December 27 has overwhelmingly failed to mention that indiscriminate attacks on civilian targets are illegal under international humanitarian law. Israel’s recent aerial attacks on Gazan infrastructure, including a TV station, police stations, a mosque, a university and […]
The Israeli attacks in the Gaza Strip that began in late December have reportedly killed over 500 Palestinians, many of them civilians and children. As is often the case, U.S. corporate media’s presentation of the events leading up to this dramatic escalation in violence have laid the blame for the violence mostly with Hamas, whose […]
Corporate media are cheering what they suggest are signs that President-elect Barack Obama will break his campaign promise and defy both U.S. and Iraqi public opinion to keep combat troops in Iraq for longer than his 16-month withdrawal timetable. Complicating these media efforts to find a shift in Obama’s Iraq policy is that he has […]
