FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
If you want a lesson in how right-wing pressure on corporate media works, look no further than the ACORN story. Right-wing talkshow hosts have targeted the community organizing group for years, primarily on charges of vote fraud. Then two conservative activists produced some embarrassing videos of ACORN workers at some local offices giving tax advice […]
Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen writes today of Iran’s nuclear program: They then turned themselves in to the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna and, as usual, said the site was intended for the peaceful use of nuclear energy. These Persians lie like a rug. Classy. The fact that this appears in a column chastising […]
We’ve talked about these “Topic A” debates in the Washington Post before, and today’s installment is a doozy. The topic on the table is Obama’s media strategy. And, as before, the important people are on the political right, Here are the right-wingers: Karl Rove, Dan Schnur(communications director of John McCain’s 2000 presidential campaign), Ed Rogers […]
Remember back in 2007/2008 when Democratic candidate Barack Obama was being called an elitist? Well, if you miss that kind of media coverage, the Washington Post‘s Dana Milbank has got you covered (9/18/09) here, writing up Michelle Obama’s visitto aD.C. farmers market: The promotion of organic and locally grown food, though an admirable cause, is […]
Under the headline “Washington Post Publishes More Information About Exciting Alternate Universe,” A Tiny Revolution blogger Jonathan Schwarz (9/13/09) lets us know that, while “lots of banks had to get a bailout from the federal government,” do “you know who didn’t? The ultra-smart guys at BlackRock investment management, that’s who”–at least according to the September […]
CIA employees in recent years have been more likely to be engaged in waterboarding and other forms of torture than to have performed death-defying, world-saving undercover work.
Conservative Democratic Sen. Max Baucus of Montana unveiled his long-awaited health reform proposal yesterday, the results of weeks of negotiations among the Senate Finance Committee’s so-called “Gang of Six”–three Democrats from the right-wing of their party and three moderate-to-conservative Republicans. The bill (unsurprisingly) does not include a public option andcouldend up leavingmiddle-income Americans paying too […]
In citing how Talking Points Memo creator Josh Marshall “has talked many times about the ways in which the Washington establishment is ‘wired for the GOP,’” Steve Benen (Political Animal, 9/13/09) notes that “the Washington Post offers a helpful example today”–as posted on Media Matters: “Behold the media’s glaring double standard. Today, the Post puts […]
The Washington Post had another “Topic A” feature on August 31, headlined “Is the War in Afghanistan Worth Fighting?” A crucial debate, to be sure; the Post found one person (Andrew Bacevich) to argue that it is not, which is probably a position close to the majority view of the American public. That position is […]
“Robert Samuelson Doesn’t Like Trains” is what Dean Baker (Beat the Press, 8/24/09) takes to be “the unifying theme from his column today, since his arguments against high-speed rail do not make a lot of sense.” In his August 24 broadside against what he dubs Barack Obama’s “Rail Boondoggle,” Samuelson trots out the tired argument […]
Longtime friend of FAIR Sam Husseini (Husseini.org, 8/21/09) has a new blog post responding to Robert Kuttner’s recent Washington Post column, in which the American Prospect magazine editor “asks ‘Where are the liberal protesters?’”: It seems like a good question. Until one considers the source of the complaint–and that rather helps answer the question. Maybe […]
Columnist Rick Perlstein has a new analysis of “Birthers, Town Hall Hecklers and the Return of Right-Wing Rage” in the Washington Post (8/16/09). In it, he tells why “liberals are right to be vigilant about manufactured outrage,” and particularly about how the mainstream media can too easily become that outrage’s entry into the political debate. […]
The big news in the health reform debate is that the White House seems to be willing to give up on the “public option,” a government insurance program that would compete with private insurers. Everyone sees this as a big story, but there’s something revealing about the way the Washington Post‘s Ceci Conollyled her piece: […]
The escalation of the Afghanistan war is the “Topic A” discussion on the Washington Post op-ed page on Sunday. (It’s a regular feature where they ask a panel of Important People to weigh in on an issue of the day.) The title was “How Many Troops for Afghanistan?”—one can already spot the problem with that—but […]
Women In Media & News has reposted Veronica Arreola’s (8/15/09) elucidation of exactly “why women need to be at the freaking table, in the newsroom and holding the editor’s red pen.” To her, “it’s just as simple as women see things differently. Not better, not worse, just differently”: The latest example is the WaPo “Mouthpiece […]
Economist Dean Baker (Beat the Press, 8/9/09) sees the Washington Post as simply “keeping with its strict editorial policy of only letting others tell readers what ‘populists’ think,” when publishing its August 9 “front-page article on setting executive compensation at banks receiving bailout money”—one which “never presented the views of an actual populist.” Instead, Baker […]
Guest Women In Media & News blogger Adele M. Stan (8/5/09) has some more to say about the WashingtonPost.com‘s “now-infamous ‘Mad Bitch’ video”: Last Friday, Talking Points Memo‘s Brian Beutler shone a light on a video produced by the Washington Post that featured one of the two columnists hosting the piece suggesting that, at a […]
Howard Kurtz recently offered fellow Washington Post reporters Dana Milbank and Chris Cillizza a chance to apologize for having, in an online Post feature, “implied Hillary Clinton was a ‘bitch.’” But American Prospect‘s Tapped blogger Adam Serwer (8/5/09) has a question regarding Milbank’s aside that “it’s a brutal world out there in the blogosphere…. I’m […]
Today’s Washington Post offers a helpful lesson on the media’s notion of centrism; see the headline and subhead: Senators Closer to Health Package: Bipartisan Talks on Reform Move Toward Center The “talks” refer to the plan coming out of the Senate Finance Committee–a plan that “seeks middle ground” and couldprovide media-friendly “bipartisan agreement.” One of […]
Quipping that “usually newspapers are big defenders of free speech, but not the Washington Post,” economic reporting critic Dean Baker (Beat the Press, 8/2/09) takes down the paper’s recent piece giving over “nearly 2,000 words to complain that a website had ripped off” one reporter’s story. Careful to say that “the problem was not that […]
