FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
In examining how the “national news media remains largely enthralled by the pro-Republican rules of the past three decades,” Robert Parry (Consortium News, 2/28/09) notes that “in both right-wing and mainstream news organizations, stories continue to be structured as faulting Obama and largely absolving Bush.” Parry looks at recent major New York Times and Washington […]
Syndicated Washington Post columnist George Will and the Post‘s ombud Andrew Alexander are still failing to address the majority of the inaccuracies in Will’s February 15 column on climate change. Facing down critics (including FAIR–Action Alert, 2/18/09), Will claimed in a new column (2/27/09) that his original “column contained many factual assertions but only one […]
Think Progress blogger Matthew Yglesias (2/25/09) hits the Washington Post for “standing behind the claim that up is down if George Will says that is”–and then spreads some of the blame around: Meanwhile, one of the Post‘s main competitors in the world of papers with potential to attract a national audience is the New York […]
After eight years of George W. Bush’s rule, popular disapproval of policies that had come to be regarded as grave mistakes–from the invasion of Iraq to the response to the economic crisis–drove the Republicans from power. Unfortunately, the media system has no such built-in check on powerful pundits, as the unchallenged reign of another George […]
George Will’s February 22 column in the Washington Post began: “A simple apology would have sufficed.” Alas, this was not a reference to Will’s error-filled column on climate change the week before (FAIR Action Alert, 2/18/09). But the paper’s new ombud did email a response to some of Will’s critics, which managed to reveal how […]
George Will’s history of misquoting data to distort the climate change debate goes back nearly two decades—that we know of. As Extra! reported in 2003, in 1992 Will trashed Al Gore (Washington Post, 9/3/92) for being “cavalier with the truth” in his “wastebasket worthy” book Earth in the Balance. More from Extra!: Will confronted Gore […]
With left-of-center columnists critiquing the Beltway obsession with bipartisanship even in outlets like the Wall Street Journal and Washington Post, it’s no wonder that David Broder is upset (Washington Post, 2/19/09). He calls the idea that Obama should stop worrying so much about attracting Republican support “the worst advice he has received,” warning that without […]
Calling it “obvious” that “promises to get beyond partisanship are the most perfunctory sort of campaign rhetoric, almost as empty as the partisanship itself,” the latest from Thomas Frank (Wall Street Journal, 2/18/09) explains the corporate media’s fetish for bipartisanship: For the Beltway commentariat, however, transcending partisanship is the most meaningful of issues, more important, […]
Journalist, author and Guantanamo prisoner advocate Andy Worthington gives the lie (Future of Freedom Foundation, 2/16/09) to Washington Post reporters’ exclamations over “‘the complexity and dangers of the issue’ of reviewing the prisoners’ cases” after Obama’s promise to close the illegal prison: As the conservative judge and George W. Bush appointee Richard Leon discovered in […]
In the wake of a George Will column (Washington Post, 2/15/08) attempting to refute the reality of climate change with a string of inaccurate claims, FAIR has an action alert calling on media activists to write to the Washington Post asking them to retract the falsehoods and explain their fact-checking procedures for columnists. You can […]
Washington Post columnist George Will is among the most widely syndicated in the newspaper business—which means that his recent error-filled column about climate change will misinform the readers of hundreds of papers across the country. Will made several specious claims in his February 15 column in an attempt to argue that climate change is not […]
In the same column (2/16/09) that he cites Sam Donaldson’s reputation as a “blowhard liberal,” the Washington Post‘s Howard Kurtz has an item in which he complains that “the Vogue cover story on Michelle Obama, by editor at large André Leon Talley, is nothing if not laudatory.” Kurtz writes: The Talley article mentions briefly that […]
Discussing the retirement of ABC‘s Sam Donaldson, Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz writes (2/16/09): Donaldson’s detractors viewed him as a liberal blowhard, and there were certainly times when his mouth outran his brain. I would certainly count FAIR as being among Donaldson’s detractors, and we viewed him as someone who was frequently mistaken for […]
Consortium News has an informative list (2/15/09) of “some special stories from the previous month” that were neglected by corporate media obsessively “focusing on the end of the Bush era and the start of the Obama era”–here’s a sampling: “WPost Columnist Excuses Torture,” by David Swanson, cataloging the excuses for torture. (January 4, 2009)… “WPost […]
There’s been a corporate media trope lately that the stimulus bill, despite Barack Obama’s assurances, contains “pork.” It’s not always clear what “pork” means, but the Washington Post today (2/13/09) had an example of the genre–headlined “Despite Pledges, Stimulus Has Some Pork”–that opens with a definition of what it means by the term. Unfortunately, it’s […]
Calling it “something of a breakthrough” that, at his most recent press conference, Barack Obama took a question from Sam Stein of the Huffington Post, Steve Benen (Political Animal, 1/10/09) explains that Washington Post media writer Howard Kurtz isn’t quite correct in saying “Obama made a bit of history by calling on the first blogger […]
Sometimes iconoclastic Washington pundit E. J. Dionne Jr. comes up with a winner (Washington Post, 2/2/09) in this description of the crucial media role in political chicanery on the national level: If achieving bipartisanship takes priority over the actual content of policy, Republicans are handed a powerful weapon. In theory, they can keep moving the […]
Far from holding the feet of the powerful to the fire, “liberal” Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen is the very model of the establishment-protecting beltway hack. Glenn Greenwald walks us through Cohen’s history of cheering for the capital’s criminal class, with a focus on the columnist’s latest call to sweep torture under the rug.
Looking back on the good old days when we all supported torture, Richard Cohen writes today in the Washington Post (1/27/09): “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” So goes an aphorism that needs to be applied to the current debate over whether those who authorized and used torture should be […]
Reading this at the bottom of neo-con William Kristol‘s column in the New York Times (1/26/09): This is William Kristol’s last column. Homer says, “Woohoo!” Then reading this at the Politico: EXCLUSIVE: Progressives will delight when they get to the italic note at the end of Bill Kristol’s column in the Times today say, “This […]
