FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
The independent website Raw Story (5/6/09) recently summarized the human toll of the U.S. government’s torture program. Approximately 100 prisoners have died in U.S. custody in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to human rights investigators, with 34 of those deaths officially classified as homicides; at least eight individuals were tortured to death. Yet somehow, when corporate […]
Jonathan Schwarz recently caught the Washington Post crediting the author of an anti-progressive tax op-ed as just “an economics professor,” when in fact he sat on tax-funded bailout beneficiary “AIG’s board of directors. He’s also a member of the board’s finance committee.” Now, continuing (A Tiny Revolution, 5/21/09) to mine the Post‘s editorial page for […]
Corporate media’s arguments against Google are getting stranger and stranger. While previously the Washington Post had accused the search engine of “vacuum[ing] up their content without paying a dime,” now the Post has media lawyers Bruce Sanford and Bruce Brown (5/16/09) charging that search engines “crawl the Web and ingest everything in their path.” Can […]
Quoting Sen. Lindsey Graham’s statement at a May 13 Senate hearing that “one of the reasons these techniques have been used for about 500 years is that they work,” Robert Parry (Consortium News, 5/16/09) explains that this is “implicitly endorsing the Spanish Inquisition’s brutal treatment of Jews, Muslims, Protestants and other alleged heretics from the […]
Responding to a “stupid” critique of his May 1 column defending the use of terror in “ticking timebomb” scenarios, Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer (5/15/09) asserts that there has too been a real-life example of such a situation: On October 9, 1994, Israeli Cpl. Nachshon Waxman was kidnapped by Palestinian terrorists. The Israelis captured the […]
Hearing “the whining retreat of a whipped pup instead of the toothy growl of a watchdog,” the Colorado Independent‘s John Tomasic (5/11/09) quotes Washington Post reporter Paul Kane answering an online question with a new excuse for refusing to “call waterboarding people and slamming them into walls torture”–“because [the Post] fears a lawsuit for libel”: […]
Yesterday the Social Security and Medicare trustees’ reports were released. This annual ritual often gives reporters a chance to exaggerate the long-term problems of the Social Security system. This year, the news was more or less what folks were expecting: By the trustees’ forecasting, Social Security’s trust fund will be depleted in 2037, while Medicare’s […]
We’ve written about this before, but today (5/11/09) the Washington Post‘s Howard Kurtz turned in another example of journalists who seem to believe Google is what’s killing their industry.Responding totalks between his employer and Google about some sort of collaboration, Kurtz writes: Hanging over the talks is the reality that the search giant, while funneling […]
In the wake of the release of the U.S. military’s own figures showing a record number of bombs were dropped by U.S. warplanes in Afghanistan during April, newspapers are reporting today on a particularly deadly bombing attack on Monday that killed over 100 civilians, according to Afghan officials and witnesses. Anonymous U.S. military officials of […]
In a column attacking Google and other “accused newspaper industry killers,” the Washington Post‘s Dana Milbank (5/7/09) doesn’t present much of an argument for why newspapers are dying—but he provides an excellent example of why journalism like his deserves to die. [Marissa] Mayer, who oversees Google News, explained how “Google is doing its part” to […]
The North American Congress on Latin America has published (NACLA Magazine, 5-6/09) Dan Beeton’s account of how, following Evo Morales’ huge win in the Bolivian presidential referendum of last August, his opponents instigated “riots, economic sabotage and the massacre of more than 20 indigenous”–during which Bolivia threw out the U.S. ambassador for attempted spying and […]
Even though “James Risen, David Johnston and Neil A. Lewis first told the world about waterboarding in May 2004,” Dan Froomkin (WashingtonPost.com, 5/4/09) is having to argue that “that doesn’t mean that the rest of us are as guilty as the people who committed the crimes–or that those who ordered those crimes should avoid accountability.” […]
Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen uses the Frank Ricci Supreme Court case to attack affirmative action: The justification for affirmative action gets weaker and weaker. Maybe once it was possible to argue that some innocent people had to suffer in the name of progress, but a glance at the White House strongly suggests that things […]
The Washington Post editorial page regularly slams Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, so it was no surprise to see it do the same on April 30. Their real point, though, was to suggest that Barack Obama’s desire to change the tone of the U.S.-Venezuelan relationship wasn’t going to work: The administration’s strategy–to open up a constructive […]
A couple of recent FAIR Blog posts have dealt with apologists for torture: Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen and former CIA interrogator John Kiriakou, who misled ABC News about the effectiveness of waterboarding. What’s striking is how they both offer the same insight into why torture is attractive—it met their post–September 11 psychological needs. Kiriakou […]
In his column today, Washington Post‘s Richard Cohen tells us that he is against torture, which itself is not remarkable. His real point is this: Yet the debate over torture has been infected with silly arguments about utility: whether it works or not. Of course it works—sometimes or rarely, but if a proverbial bomb is […]
Today the Washington Post devoted front-page real estate to an examination of how some wealthy people who don’t think of themselves as wealthy will suffer under Obama’s proposed tax plans. Their primary example is Gail Johnson, who, along with her husband, earns about $515,000 in a typical year from the chain of preschools and after-school […]
The school voucher program in Washington, D.C., has been the subject of serious research, with opponents and supporters of vouchers using at as a test for whether the idea works in practice. Conservativestend toinsist that it’s been a success, though the studies of the program don’t seem to bear that out. Washington Post columnist George […]
Regular NewsHour left/right panelists Mark Shields and David Brooks were off on April 18. Sitting in on the right was former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson. In the liberal chair was Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus, who is not exactly known for her strong progressive views. And in fact, Marcus established that fact right from the […]
Washington Post/Newsweek economics columnist Robert Samuelson was recently out plugging his new book at an event recorded by C-SPAN. Samuelson began his remarks (watch the video here, at the 4:20 mark) by saying: I am not an economist. I’m a journalist. And so that anything I say that seems contradictory to what a freshman in […]
