FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
Obama’s selection of conservative Democrat William Daley as his new chief of staff didn’t surprise anyone.So reporters were left to explain the political shift behind the move. Some saw little movement at all, since Daley’s political views would seem more or less in line with his predecessor Rahm Emanuel. The Washington Post (1/7/11)offered this somewhat […]
The Washington Post‘s account(1/6/11) of John Boehner’s first day as Speaker of the House could have been a press release from Boehner’s office. The headline was “A Modest Boehner Takes Congress’s Most Powerful Office.” Post readers learned that”Boehner tends to shun big moments such as these. He’s more at home on the golf course with […]
There’s been a spate of reporting and commentary attacking public workers for having lavish pensions that are bankrupting various states. CBS‘s 60 Minutes got into the act in December with a report (12/19/10) that was criticized for lionizing Republican New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (obviously this came before his snow troubles) for his attacks on […]
Chris Hedges has a new column about the state of the progressive movement, and in it Ralph Nader goes on a tear about the corporate media that can’t really be summarized–so here’s the whole thing: The banishment from the corporate media, Nader argues, has been one of the major contributors to the demoralization and weakening […]
David Ignatius of the Washington Post (12/29/10): I’ve seen Petraeus give many briefings over the years, and it’s a bit like watching a magician at work. Even though you’ve seen the trick before, and you know the patter, you still get mesmerized. He has the ability to make people believe the impossible might be doable, […]
Today’s Washington Post (12/21/10) brings a story by Janine Zacharia headlined, “Aid groups decry Israel’s Gaza constraints.” The lead: Despite recent moves by Israel to ease construction in the Gaza Strip, restrictions on building materials are hampering international humanitarian efforts while doing little to impede the Hamas-led government they are designed to weaken, aid and […]
Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank derides WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange for being “insufferable”–apparently because he emerged from prison talking about prison conditions.
In a column (12/19/10) devoted to attacking others for “the intentional manipulations of language to obscure truth,” Washington Post columnist and CNN host Kathleen Parker spends most of her time targeting Democrats over the tax cut debate: Democrats are equally guilty of obfuscation through language distortion. How many times throughout the tax bill debate have […]
ApparentlyRichard Holbrooke’s final words were, “You’ve got to stop this war in Afghanistan.”This is being highlighted in a big way on the Drudge Report, which meansmedia people will be talking about it. Revealing, in an entirely different way, was this part of a Washington Post story (12/14/10) about the state of the Afghan War post-Holbrooke: […]
One of the more annoying corporate media storylines since the midterms dwells on whether or not Barack Obama will move to the “center” in order to have better luck in the 2012 elections. The conventional wisdom is that Bill Clinton did this after terrible losses in the 1994 midterms, and his “triangulation” proved once […]
The Dean is happy. Washington Post columnist and “dean” of the Beltwaypress corps David Broder was one of the few people (not counting Republicans) who stood up to applaud Barack Obama’s tax deal. Under the I-am-not-making-this-up headline “Centrist on the Rise,” Broder (12/9/10) congratulated Obama, who has”separated himself from the left of his own party […]
A Washington Post editorial (12/3/10) on the film Fair Game complains that “the film’s reception illustrates a more troubling trend of political debates in Washington in which established facts are willfully ignored.” Talk about lack of self-awareness. The film dramatizes the story of Joseph Wilson, a former ambassador who blew the whistle on the Bush […]
In today’s Washington Post (12/2/10), in the news article “Deficit Commission Sets Ideology Aside,” reporters Lori Montgomery and Brady Dennis explain why the commission is not ideological: Confronted with a deficit-reduction plan loaded with political dynamite, members from both parties set aside ideological orthodoxy at least briefly, sparking hope that their work could ignite a […]
Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen uses WikiLeaks as a jumping off point to talk about George W. Bush’s new book and the run-up to the Iraq War (11/30/10): As my colleague, the indefatigably indefatigable Walter Pincus, has pointed out, Bush manages to bollix up both the chronology and the importance of the various inspections of […]
From Sunday’s Washington Post (11/28/10): FBI Foils Elaborate Bomb Plot in Oregon Given the circumstances of this particular case (covered in great detail by Glenn Greenwald), I think the Post meant either “FBI Concocts Elaborate Bomb Plot in Oregon” or”FBI Foils Its Own Elaborate Bomb Plot in Oregon.”Even the Post‘s own account explained in the […]
From one of the Washington Post‘s stories about WikiLeaks: A senior U.S. intelligence officer, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to be identified, said: “No one should think of American diplomats as spies. But our diplomats do, in fact, help add to our country’s body of knowledge on a wide […]
Yesterday (11/22/10) Jackson Diehl of the Washington Post wrote a column headlined “Obama’s Foreign Policy Needs an Update,” where he worried that the White House suffers from a”lack of grand strategy — or strategists. Its top foreign-policy makers are a former senator, a Washington lawyer and a former Senate staffer. There is no Henry Kissinger, […]
Beware: The dean of the D.C. press corps is disappointed. In his Washington Post column today (“Dodgeball for Democrats,” 11/18/10), David Broder leads off with this: When the rules of the House of Representatives forced the Democrats to confront a painful choice among their leaders, they did what Democrats are often inclined to do. They […]
The Washington Post‘s Steven Pearlstein (11/11/10), one of the few Americans (by his own account) who DOESN’T need to have his wages cut, writes: Reducing the federal deficit won’t by itself do much to balance the U.S. trade account by increasing exports, but to the degree it involves increases in taxes or decreases in employment […]
It’s never hard to figure out what side the media are on when it comes to corporate-friendly “free trade” deals. They’re for them,because they’re “free,” and people whooppose themapparentlyprefer protectionism over freedom. So Barack Obama’s apparent failure tonegotiate a trade deal with South Korea is bad news–thoughit’s hard to read the papers and figure out […]
