FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
You may have heard last week that right-wing media critics were howling about this: “Those liberals are calling us dumb!” seemed to be the feeling on the right–a strange reaction to a piece written by conservative Andrew Sullivan. Newsweek is back on the case this week: The response to conservative Sullivan comes from…. conservative writer […]
To me, the most interesting observation after the South Carolina primary came from New York magazine reporter and regular TV pundit John Heilemann, who said this on MSNBC (h/t Nicole Belle at Crooks and Liars): Gingrich is going to get so much free media attention over the next few days. It is going to be […]
A new research paper by a team of economists got a lot of pretty favorable press because it appears to deliver results that would seem to confirm what many in the media believe about American schools: If you could just use standardized test scores to weed out underperforming teachers, you would see serious improvement in […]
Time columnist Joe Klein jumped to Newt Gingrich‘s defense (12/19/11) when the Republican presidential candidate floated the idea that poor school children should work as janitors at their schools. Klein’s endorsement (FAIR Blog, 12/9/11) earned him a coveted P.U. Litzer Prize. But apparently there’s more to it. As Klein explains in this week’s issue of […]
If Arthur Brisbane wants the Times to consider becoming factchecking ‘truth vigilantes,” this is hopefully not what he had in mind. At last night’s Republican debate (1/19/12), CNN host John King asked the candidates how they would convince a corporation like Apple to employ more workers in the United States: It employs about 500,000 people […]
Remember last week’s uproar about the New York Times and factchecking? In today’s paper, we see a great example of how this works. Former Democratic Sen. Chris Dodd’s new job is as a lobbyist for the Motion Picture Association of America, which means he’s leading the charge in support of SOPA, the bill that big […]
Evaluating reporting and commentary about Iran could be reduced to one simple rule: There is no evidence that Iran is working on a nuclear weapon. Statements that suggest otherwise are misleading. Reports that fail to point this out are doing readers/viewers/listeners a disservice. That sounds simple enough. But don’t tell that to the outlets that […]
The presidential campaign is breaking down along familiar ideological lines, according to New York Times reporter John Harwood (1/12/12): American voters loathe both major symbols of the forces squeezing their pocketbooks and life savings. President Obama will seek re-election vowing to rein in one of them: Wall Street. Mitt Romney will focus on the other: […]
Last month the group Just Foreign Policy alerted readers to a Washington Post feature that was headlined “Iran’s Quest to Possess Nuclear Weapons.” The Post changed the headline, and ombud Patrick Pexton weighed in with a column (12/7/11) saying that the IAEA report does not say Iran has a bomb, nor does it say it […]
In its new issue, Newsweek puts this as #4 on their list of “31 Ways To Get Smarter In 2012”: 4. Get News from Al Jazeera Don’t shut yourself out from new ideas. A 2009 study found that viewers of Al Jazeera English were more open-minded than people who got their news from CNN International […]
Elizabeth Jensen has a preview (New York Times, 1/8/12) of the new Bill Moyers program coming to public television stations later this month–a show that is not being distributed by PBS. Why not? She reports: Mr. Moyers said he was unsure why PBS, where he has spent most of his career since 1971, declined the […]
Real estate developer and media mogul Mort Zuckerman has picked Colin Myler to be the new top editor for his New York tabloid, the Daily News. That’s a surprising choice on at least a couple of accounts. One is that Myler’s last job was at Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World, which was shut down […]
The usual criticisms of the Iowa caucuses–that the votes of a small, demographically unrepresentative slice of America gobble up too much airtime–are basically correct. As David Sirota noted in Salon (1/3/12): The same journalism industry that pleads poverty to justify cutting big city newspapers’ editorial staffs, gutting coverage of state legislatures and city councils, and […]
Sean Hannity got his start in radio on UC Santa Barbara’s KCSB in the late 1980s, where he got in trouble for promoting homophobia and disinformation about HIV and AIDS. I wrote about this in a 2003 Extra! profile of the then-Fox News show Hannity & Colmes: After airing for less than a year, Hannity’s […]
The new issue of Time magazine promises on its cover “Essential Info for the Year Ahead.” One apparently essential report: U.S. drones are awesome. The report–written by Mark Thompson, available to subscribers only explains that a “hot military trend” this way: Today’s generals and admirals want weapons that are smaller, remote-controlled and bristling with intelligence. […]
Washington Post reporter Nia-Malika Henderson reports today (1/3/12) that Republican candidate Ron Paul really says some weird things out on the campaign trail. His appearances start out normal… And then, for the next 45 minutes or so, he outlines a view of the world so bleak it would make Chicken Little sound like an optimist. […]
On December 25, New York Times reporter David Barstow filed this update on the scandal that he broke back in 2008: A Pentagon public relations program that sought to transform high-profile military analysts into “surrogates” and “message force multipliers” for the Bush administration complied with Defense Department regulations and directives, the Pentagon’s inspector general has […]
Left-wing activist and author Noam Chomsky is in the New York Times today: The American linguist Noam Chomsky, a prominent source of intellectual inspiration for President Hugo Chavez, made a new appeal on Wednesday for the release of Maria Lourdes Afiuni, a judge arrested two years ago by the secret intelligence police. If you find […]
“Ron Paul Ignored by the Media? Not So Much” was the headline on a National Journal post yesterday (12/21/11). “The Texan’s campaign has raised millions of dollars to combat the alleged media conspiracy that, they claim, is out to destroy the candidate the media fears most,” the Journal‘s Sarah Mimms reported. “There is just one […]
The Monday broadcast of CBS Evening News (12/19/11) began with big news, with anchor Scott Pelley announcing: The secretary of Defense says tonight that the United States will not allow Iran to develop a nuclear weapon. In an interview with CBS News, Leon Panetta says that despite efforts to disrupt their nuclear program, the Iranians […]
