FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
Of the 30 items published on Gorsuch since Trump’s announcement, 17 could be construed as neutral and 13 were explicitly positive. None openly opposed Gorsuch or leveled criticisms beyond mild qualifiers:
Unmoored for commercial reasons from any hard and fast standards for what constitutes a fact, media factologists are free to follow their own political whims (or those of their outlets). Which seems to be what’s going on in a recent Washington Post factchecking effort by Glenn Kessler, “Bernie Sanders’ Claim That ‘36,000 People Will Die Yearly’ if Obamacare Is Repealed.”
The Washington Post and New York Times attribute the rise in support for the right to people losing from globalization. In fact, people are suffering because of the insistence of the European Union that its members pursue austerity policies.
Because words and history evidently have no meaning, the Washington Post decided to honor civil rights hero Martin Luther King Jr. by painting him as a “true conservative.”
The problem is that the Washington Post’s “Fact Checker” column is often not in the business of checking facts, but instead offers its own judgements and opinions under the imprimatur of factchecking.
Blaming Trump on the Voters Who Voted Against Him… Protesting a President Is Like Nazi Graffiti… Trump Family Paper Demands FBI Go After Dissent… Corporate Media Diversity: From GE to GM… Protecting a Pundit Who Dismissed Trans Rights… Sanders, Warren Don’t Meet WaPo’s Standards for ‘Progressive’
While thanks to the Washington Post’s grant of anonymity, PropOrNot’s hidden principals remained safe from inquiring reporters and Russian hackers alike, editors of sites named on its McCarthyite hit list quickly found themselves deluged with venomous calls and emails.
That a group of Cold Warrior hacks would publish such a blacklist is not a surprise; that one of the most established names in American news would uncritically parrot it was.
It’s unsurprising that Richard Cohen–notorious for his racialized worldview–evokes Latin America as a symbol of disregard for civil liberties. It’s also not surprising that as his example of bad Latin American–style oppression, he picks Nicaragua.
A FAIR analysis of front-page election coverage in three major dailies revealed a strong emphasis on horserace politics at the expense of issue coverage. The study found a lopsided focus on Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton, and an overwhelming focus on the presidential race at the expense of all other electoral contests.
Robert Samuelson argues you should vote for a GOP Congress to show that Clinton does not have “a compelling agenda,” and vote for Clinton to show that the Republicans’ control of Congress does “not signal the popularity of their political philosophy, whatever it is.”
In a moment of outright self-parody, Applebaum notes that “rumors of election fraud can create the same hysteria as real election fraud” while spending 800 words doing nothing but spreading rumors of election fraud.
In pushing trade agreements, it is fair to say anything, even if it has no relationship to the truth. Therefore it is not surprising to see Fareed Zakaria pushing the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) by claiming that it will boost growth.
When US media—to say nothing of the leading contender to be the next president of the US—allege that foreign elements are steering our politics, that’s rational, serious discourse. When others do it, it’s laughable, unhinged blabbering.
Cigarettes are not just a “drug of any kind.” They’re actually a drug that kills far more people in the US than opioid overdoses—480,000 per year, according to the CDC, vs. 28,647 for opioid ODs.
While welcome, disclosure is not an inoculation. We still look askance at a news story with lines like, “That the sale drew such strong spending from shoppers for a second year suggests that Amazon is making inroads establishing this as an appointment summer shopping event.”
One of the more urgent tasks for the Serious Person Club of late is lumping Sanders and Trump together in an effort to discredit the former and apologize for the latter. Thursday in the Washington Post, Fareed Zakaria attempted to do just that.
The Washington Post’s Callum Borchers cited FAIR research in a story about complaints that C-SPAN continued to cover the Democratic sit-in on the House floor even after House Speaker Paul Ryan had the network’s cameras turned off.
In “An Expensive Reminder That Sanders Still Hasn’t Dropped Out: His Secret Service Detail,” the Washington Post used an eight-year-old stat to provide urgency to thesis that Sanders’ quixotic campaign is draining us, the good American “taxpayer,” of resources.
The Washington Post reported on Tuesday (6/14/16) that Russian intelligence had hacked the DNC servers to steal opposition research on Donald Trump. Dozens of media outlets who picked up on the story uncritically presented Russian guilt in their headlines without qualification.
