FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
If you know anything of substance about Paul Ryan, it’s that the Republican vice presidential pick knows his numbers. A Washington Post profile today by Michael Leahy (8/20/12) tells us: He got his start on Capitol Hill as a 19-year-old intern working in the mailroom of Sen. Bob Kasten (R-Wis.). That led in time to […]
Washington Post columnist Dan Balz has a big scoop from an anonymous source in today’s paper (8/14/12): The choice, like most vice presidential selections, also was a way for Romney to say something bigger about the kind of campaign he hopes to run. In that sense, advisers say, Ryan was “Mitt’s pick, completely.” “Stories talk […]
Senator Harry Reid started a whole lot of trouble on the campaign trail when he told some Huffington Post reporters that he’d heard that Mitt Romney paid no taxes. As in zero. For an entire decade. Now there are reasons to be skeptical of Reid’s account. As Dana Milbank pointed out, Reid’s record does not […]
Coverage of national political campaigns is generally pretty bad–a parade of polls, horesrace analysis and fundraising tallies, with pundits doing their best at pretending they’re campaign strategists. Can it actually get worse than that? Maybe. NBC reporter Chuck Todd made that case with a full page article in the Washington Post on August 5 that compared […]
You can count on U.S. corporate media to express alarm about the threat posed by left-wing governments in Latin America. Sometimes it’s military hype (think Soviet MiGs in Nicaragua), but more typically it takes the form of a generalized concern about certain governments’ commitment to democratic ideals. But how do you sound the alarm about […]
The criticism of Mitt Romney’s time at Bain Capital doesn’t appear to be leaving the headlines. And thus some political reporters are, as Jamison Foser notes, drawing an unusual comparison: Romney is being Swift Boated. The latest example comes from Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen (7/17/12): In a sense, Romney deserves the Swift Boating he’s […]
The “Fast & Furious” scandal has been a staple of right-wing media, where it is either evidence of a White House dodging accountability (a legitimate argument) or a plot to create chaos in order to pass more stringent gun laws (a bizarre and nonsensical conspiracy theory). But a recent Fortune investigation (6/27/12) showed that the […]
The New York Times has a piece today (7/10/12) that pairs Obama’s tax announcement with Republican attempts to kill Obamacare, presenting both as “politically charged proposals.” It’s hard to see how the two are at all similar, but the Times attempts to make the connection, noting that “lawmakers worry about alienating people who like expanded […]
This is the sort of awkward juxtaposition that newspapers usually try to avoid. In today’s Washington Post (7/9/12), a story about the Keystone pipeline appears above a Chevron ad: Awkward. Then again, maybe not. Juliet Eilperin‘s article is all about what supporters of the pipeline project in the state of Montana are saying. Politicians, […]
In death, the U.S. media remembered the late Yitzhak Shamir as “a political hard-liner who served two terms as Israeli prime minster” (CNN, 6/30/12), “the hawkish Israeli leader who balked at the idea of trading occupied land for peace with the Palestinians” (MSNBC, 6/30/12) and “a man of iron will and simple tastes” (Washington Post, […]
Much of the media analysis of Iran at the moment dwells on the punitive economic sanctions targeting Iran’s economy. An additional round of more restrictive sanctions took effect at the beginning of this month, drawing renewed attention from the press. The clear message from that media coverage is this: If Iran were to come clean […]
It’s been said (by me!) that the big spending cuts set to hit the federal budget next year—so-called “sequestration”—are not created equal, at least in the eyes of the corporate media. The cuts, as designed, hit the military budget and non-military spending in roughly equal measure. The political calculation was that Republicans would object to […]
Factchecking ought to be an everyday part of each journalist’s job, but instead it’s relegated to a specialty feature. Maybe lack of regular practice explains why those side efforts are so disappointing. Take Glenn Kessler of the Washington Post‘s piece (6/21/12) on Barack Obama’s latest ad critical of presumptive Republican nominee Mitt Romney. Kessler gives […]
It’s been widely reported that on May 25, pro-Syrian forces massacred 108 civilians in the Syrian village of Houla, including 34 women and 49 children, many of whose throats were cut. The reported atrocity has sparked the latest round of appeals for intervention in the conflict in Syria. Syrian diplomats have been expelled from several […]
The Washington Post (6/11/12) had a story by headlined “Largest Health Insurer to Keep Key Parts of Law Regardless of Court Ruling.” In the piece, reporter N.C. Aizenman relayed UnitedHealthcare’s announcement that even if the Obama healthcare law is struck down by the Supreme Court, the company “will keep in place several key consumer provisions”: […]
Campaign coverage often gets bogged down in trivia—inconsequential polling data, the latest “off message” comment by an associate, and so on. But then there are the “gaffes,” when politicians say something that we’re told means a lot more than it might seem. Barack Obama’s 2008 comment about small-town voters clinging to their guns and religion […]
Yesterday reports emerged about a NATO airstrike in Logar province that, according to local officials, killed 18 civilians—the vast majority women and children. Readers of the Washington Post could learn about this (6/7/12) by flipping to page 10 and looking for this headline: Afghanistan Suicide Blasts Kill at Least 22 Civilians A suicide attack gets […]
On Sunday, there were reports of a NATO airstrike in the eastern Paktia province of Afghanistan. The early reports said that a family of eight was killed, as the New York Times reported: The casualties took place in eastern Paktia province on Saturday night when the family’s home was hit by a bomb, said Rohullah […]
Dan Balz, the Washington Post‘s chief White House correspondent (5/20/12), complains that President Barack Obama hasn’t solved America’s fiscal problems: Obama has drawn criticism for failing to offer more forceful leadership. He established the Simpson-Bowles commission but declined opportunities at key moments to push and prod for its consideration and enactment. There’s an odd syntax […]
The details are somewhat murky, but we know the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency is heavily involved in counternarcotics in Honduras. A shooting incident last Friday reportedly left four innocent people dead–including two pregnant women. Questions are being raised about whether they were shot by DEA agents who were apparently going after a boat carrying drug […]
