FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
Norman Ornstein and Thomas Mann are well-known in the Beltway. They work at big-time think tanks (Brookings and American Enterprise Institute), appear on television chat shows, and write books and op-eds that powerful people pay attention to. Lately, though, it seems they’ve become dangerous men. Mann and Ornstein recently wrote an op-ed in the Washington […]
Of all the Arab Spring uprisings, Bahrain probably gets the least attention in the U.S. press. There are perhaps some good arguments why; it could be the fact that the United States is on the side of the monarchy violently suppressing the democratic aspirations of its people. So it was news that the United States […]
The election results in Greece and France sent a clearer message about austerity: Voters don’t like it. That sentiment isn’t hard to fathom; massive spending cuts and pay cuts aren’t fixing the problems in their economies–they’re making things worse. Media coverage seems to be clearer these days about what the public thinks of austerity. But […]
I gave my daughter a tip on being a media critic: “If you see a newspaper article with the words ‘Social Security’ in the title,” I told her, “it’s probably bad.” Sure enough, the article we were looking at—”Fixing Social Security,” by Washington Post columnist Allan Sloan (4/29/12)—was pretty terrible. Sloan’s argument is that cuts […]
Last week Barack Obama declared some sort of class war on Mitt Romney–at least that’s what Fox, the New York Post and a few other outlets would have you believe. On April 18, Obama gave a speech at a community college touting, among other things, a rather common only-in-America underdog spirit: Somebody gave me an […]
Israeli Deputy Prime Minister Dan Meridor acknowledged on Al Jazeera English (4/14/12) that Iranian leaders have never called for Israel to be “wiped” off the map. Meridor agreed with interviewer Teymoor Nabili’s suggestion that the supposed remarks were never actually made; Iranian leaders, Meridor said, come basically ideologically, religiously, with the statement that Israel is […]
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has delivered a letter to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that calls for a resumption of peace negotiations. Look at the image the Washington Post (4/18/12) used to accompany its story about this : I will admit that a letter might not lend itself to an interesting graphic, but it […]
Richard Cohen says he envies people who are persuasive liars. He really ought to envy people who are persuasive writers. His column today (4/17/12) is ostensibly about how Mitt Romney is a big liar. It goes almost its entire length, though, before citing any compelling examples of Romney lying. (Cohen does say call Romney’s claim […]
Yesterday (4/12/12) Pakistan’s parliament unanimously voted in favor of a resolution that, among other things, calls for an immediate end to CIA drone strikes in their country. The Washington Post‘s account of this news included this curious observation: From Washington’s perspective, the debate in Parliament was a healthy exercise in democracy but one that is […]
The “Buffett rule”—as in Warren Buffett—suggests that super-rich should pay a tax rate comparable to middle-income earners. In Buffett’s case, this grew out of his observation that he pays a lower tax rate than his secretary. Seems straightforward enough—and the public thinks so. But the Washington Post seemed to feel otherwise on April 12. A […]
Washington Post columnist Robert Samuelson really doesn’t like Social Security and Medicare. And he’ll go a long way to argue that they’re wasteful, inefficient forms of welfare. (See Extra!, 10/11.) But his arguments rarely hold up. His most recent column (4/9/12) is no exception; in fact, it recycles a totally misleading factoid from a column […]
Last year Republican Rep. Paul Ryan presented a budget plan that was, according to one analysis, full of “dubious assertions, questionable assumptions and fishy figures.” But Ryan’s brand of budget austerity makes the media swoon–hence we saw coverage (FAIR Media Advisory, 4/12/11) of Ryan’s “piercing blue eyes” that dubbed him “a PowerPoint fanatic with an […]
The big New York Times story on the Afghan War today (3/27/12) focuses on public opinion in the United States, which is now dramatically anti-war: 69 percent think we shouldn’t be there. An interesting point argument is raised later in the piece, when two sources make the argument that the war wouldn’t be so unpopular […]
Newspaper columnists often seem to get to write what they want. So it’s interesting when two of them are writing about the same thing on the same day—and arriving at the opposite conclusion. In the Washington Post (3/23/12) , conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer wrote this about the Affordable Care Act’s costs, as tallied by the […]
Coverage of Israel/Palestine often attempts to make an extraordinarily lopsided conflict seem somehow more “balanced.” Take this line from the Washington Post (3/12/12) The fighting has killed 18 Gazans, all but two of them militants, and disrupted the lives of about 1 million Israelis living within range of rocket fire. Why would 18 people who […]
The big news today looks and sounds familiar. Here’s USA Today (3/8/12): Here’s what that Associated Press piece is reporting: VIENNA — Satellite images of an Iranian military facility appear to show trucks and earth-moving vehicles at the site, indicating an attempted cleanup of radioactive traces possibly left by tests of a nuclear-weapon trigger, diplomats […]
Rush Limbaugh’s attack on Georgetown student Sandra Fluke–calling her, among other things, a “slut” for advocating for contraceptives coverage–has caused some stirrings on the right that are worth looking at. One outcome is the idea that Limbaugh’s an outlier who sensible people repudiated. Kathleen Parker‘s Washington Post column on Saturday (3/2/12) cheered Limbaugh for uniting […]
Kudos to Paul Farhi of the Washington Post (3/2/12) for talking about the obvious deceptions and inaccuracies in right-wing publisher Andrew Breitbart’s work: News organizations found, for example, that the ACORN videos–which purported to show a young Mr. Breitbart ally named James O’Keefe posing as a pimp seeking advice from the organization about how to […]
There’s a popular verb in headlines about climate researcher Peter Gleick’s admission that he used trickery to get damning documents out of the climate change–denialist group the Heartland Institute: “Activist Says He Lied to Obtain Climate Papers” (New York Times, 2/21/12); “Scientist Peter Gleick Admits He Lied to Get Climate Documents” (L.A. Times, 2/21/12); “Climate […]
It’s possible that someone could write a column arguing that efforts to restrict the influence of big money on our political system do more harm than good. Washington Post columnist Robert Samuelson tried to pull it off on Monday (2/20/12), but the results were pretty ugly. You don’t need to read the whole column. All […]
