FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
The conflicts of interest posed by think tank funding are an endemic problem in establishment journalism, which often presents industry-funded institutes as neutral experts.
The vast majority of the reports on the Trump/Saudi arms deal omitted a rather key piece of context—namely, whom the weapons will be used to kill.
FAIR has noted 30 media mentions of CSIS pushing the THAAD missile system or its underlying value proposition in US media. Omitted from all these CSIS media appearances, however, is that one of CSIS’s top donors, Lockheed Martin, is THAAD’s primary contractor.
Find someone who looks at you the way US media look at bombs.
Note the assurance with which Zakaria insists that a military attack on a sovereign state, unauthorized by the United Nations and unjustifiable in terms of self-defense, signifies a new respect on Trump’s part for “global norms” and “international rules.”
Please contact the Washington Post and urge it to stop allowing corporations to sponsor events when they have a direct financial interest in the subject.
Some media accounts are describing the first raid on Trump’s watch as “botched,” but that’s not the same as questioning it, much less putting it in a broader context of what’s happening in Yemen and what the US is doing there.
Erin Burnett, Outside Agitator… Ugliness in the Eye of the Reporter… Berrying the Lead… Justice for Corporations—Not War Crime Victims… When Is Direct Military Intervention Not Direct Military Intervention?… US Media Ignore Brazilian Coup Confession
A new poll from an unlikely source suggests that the US public and the US media have very little in common when it comes to matters of war and peace.
The fact that the United States has been literally fueling Saudi warplanes for 18 months while selling weapons and providing intelligence support to the Gulf monarchy—acts which even the US State Department believes could expose the US to war crimes prosecution—was either downplayed or ignored.
That CSIS would promote the expansion of the military and surveillance state is predictable, since that’s who pays its bills; what the Times revealed was a specific, rather direct example of this, using heretofore secret documents.
“President Obama has long refused to approve direct military intervention in Syria,” the New York Times asserted in an editorial. That’s a peculiar thing to say, given that the Times regularly covers the United States’ ongoing direct military intervention in Syria.
Practically no corporate media in the US bothered to mention when the Pentagon’s inspector general this year issued a report blasting the US Army for misreporting $6.5 trillion (that’s not a typo; it’s trillion with a T) as its spending total for the 2015 fiscal year.
“You don’t see a lot of discussion of the consequences and the connection to the arms that are coming from the United States.”
The think tank industry, as the internal emails New York Times revealed make clear, is often based on laundering influence through ostensibly neutral-sounding “institutes” or “centers,” with the fact that the average media consumer won’t know who funds them being part of the service offered to donors.
The Movement for Black Lives has never relied on corporate media to get their message out. But the coalition’s newly released policy platform does provide an opportunity for journalists—sometimes given to ponder what black activists are for—to engage those ideas.
The top story for USA Today on July 8, 2016: Western countries aren’t spending enough money on weapons of war.
The story displayed not a hint of skepticism that increasing military spending is anything other than an unalloyed good.
“By and large, the mass media don’t speak out, because they would essentially have to call the president a liar and challenge his official rationale.”
We talk about using the Panama Papers to push for real change with investigative economist James Henry, and the dominant Hiroshima “narrative”—lamentable but necessary, ultimately saved more than it killed—with historian Sanho Tree.
The same US military that routinely assures us of the pinpoint accuracy of its cruise missiles, each of which cost $1.4 million, says it simply can’t afford to drop food within a mile of its target.
