FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
Sometimes you don’t need to read more than a headline. Take today’s Washington Post: Senate Gets Reacquainted With McCain the Maverick OK, let’s read just a bit: Two and a half months removed from his defeat in the race for the presidency, colleagues say, McCain bears more resemblance to the unpredictable and frequently bipartisan lawmaker […]
Two newspaper stories today provide a false account of the context of the Israeli attacks on Gaza. The Washington Post: Hamas and its allies have fired thousands of rockets into Israel in the past eight years. The pace accelerated after the Islamist movement, which won Palestinian elections in 2006, routed forces loyal to the rival […]
Harper’s Ken Silverstein is again bucking the media that condemned him for actually investigating U.S. lobbyists for foreign dictatorships–this time contrasting (1/8/09) how, “if the U.S. government deems a country to be a hostile state, the American media will devote significant time and energy reporting on that country’s political and economic problems” with the fact […]
The Washington Post recently published an editorial praising the city’s charter schools, claiming that those schools’ students outperform their public school counterparts “not because they come from more privileged backgrounds but because the charters are free to innovate and implement practices that work.” The editorial pointed to an analysis the paper did that found the […]
Washington Post columnist David Broder took up the issue of healthcare policy in his column yesterday (“Health Reform’s Moment,” 12/14/08). One of FAIR’s chief criticisms of media over the past two decades has been the narrow range of sources the media rely on to shape the debate over a given issue. Healthcare is no different, […]
Today’s Washington Post (12/9/08) features an article on the possibilities for Employee Free Choice Act– a measure that would recognize card-check unionization drives. EFCA has been pushed by labor groups and their allies, and the Post envisions the real battle is to come–hence the headline, “Battle Deepens Over Union Organizing: Labor May Be Key Issue […]
Today’s column by Robert Samuelson (Washington Post, 12/1/08) is a classic of the “why the president-elect must break progressive campaign promises” genre. Usually, of course, the new president should keep such promises: Obama won the election, and in normal times, his campaign agenda ought to be front and center. But these are not normal times, […]
Two disappointing reports in major newspapers on the healthcare debate. In the Los Angeles Times, Noam Levey writes (“Consensus Emerging on Universal Healthcare“) that the momentum for real change is obvious in Washington–but that it only goes so far: The idea of a federal, single-payer system patterned on those in Europe and Canada, long a […]
Under the headline “Pollsters Debate America’s Political Realignment,” the Washington Post‘s Robert Kaiser tries to weigh the arguments about the political makeup of the United States in light of the 2008 election. But Kaiser’s rendition of this debate only serves to confuse matters. There are basically two sides to this clash: those who say the […]
From the Washington Post yesterday–emphasis added: The United States and Pakistan reached tacit agreement in September on a don’t-ask-don’t-tell policy that allows unmanned Predator aircraft to attack suspected terrorist targets in rugged western Pakistan, according to senior officials in both countries. In recent months, the U.S. drones have fired missiles at Pakistani soil at an […]
The Washington Post editorial yesterday on Nicaragua begins: Through much of the 1980s, the United States waged a proxy war to prevent Daniel Ortega and his Sandinista party from consolidating a dictatorship in Nicaragua. In 1990, Mr. Ortega finally agreed to hold a presidential election, which he lost…. That history is false. Nicaragua held a […]
After giving a dubious account of the causes of the Democrats’ 1994 electoral disaster, Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson (11/14/08) provides an inaccurate description of the Fairness Doctrine, which he calls a federal regulation (overturned by the Reagan administration in 1987) requiring broadcast outlets to give equal time to opposing political viewpoints. Under this doctrine, […]
You see some absurd standards being set for how far President-elect Barack Obama should tip his cabinet to the right. Al Kamen in the Washington Post (11/7/07) writes that if “he’s serious about this bipartisan thing…then he’s going to have to do better than his predecessors, probably putting at least three non-D’s in the cabinet […]
After the Washington Post‘s David Broder weighed in with his thoughts on what he “learned” about John McCain in the course of the campaign–among other things, that it was a “falsehood” to suggest McCain was similar to George W. Bush–it was time for Post readers to find out what the Dean of the Washington Press […]
The Washington Post‘s weekly Saturday feature on “Iraq War Casualties” has consistently listed a “maximum count” of Iraqi civilian deaths that is dramatically lower than the likely civilian death tolls assessed through surveys of the Iraqi public. In the most recent edition of this feature (10/25/08) which the Post has been publishing as a chart […]
Anthony DiMaggio finds (ZNet, 10/19/08) “the massive attention surrounding ACORN” as much evidence of “media racism as it is their class prejudice”: In danger of losing its eight year hold on the Presidency, the Republican Party has become increasingly desperate in its attacks on poor and minority groups, who have registered in increasingly large numbers […]
You don’t generally expect to see a member of a terrorist movement portrayed sympathetically in the pages of a major U.S. newspaper, but that’s what the Washington Post gave us this week (10/15/08) in a report from the West Bank by Linda Gradstein: Avi Ben Yakov is a soft-spoken Jewish settler who loves playing with […]
Washington Post fact-checker Michael Dobbs weighs in (10/16/08) on last night’s debate—the headline more or less gives it away (“Both Campaigns Distorting Facts on Money Matters”). His first fact-check, though, hardly clears the air. Some of the sharpest back-and-forth over economic issues concerned the taxes that an Ohio plumber named Joe Wurzelbacher stands to pay […]
The Washington Post (9/28/08) gathered reactions from “foreign policy analysts and others” to last Friday’s debate on international policy, and what’s striking is how hawkish the Post‘s circle of foreign policy experts is. The lineup included Henry A. Kissinger–inevitably–and a bunch of hawks from right-wing think tanks and/or the Bush administration: Danielle Pletka of AEI, […]
Continuing to prove himself as tenacious as the Washington Post is doctrinaire, economist Dean Baker provides another example (9/28/08) of how the “Post editorial board occasionally just makes up numbers to advance its arguments”
