FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
Internal problems at CNN have jumped from the gossip pages to the New York Times. Brian Stelter reports today (12/8/10) on behind-the-scenes clashesat the new program Parker Spitzer, which is co-hosted by liberal-leaning former New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer and conservative columnist Kathleen Parker. Stelter writes: The ratings for CNN‘s latest experiment are stagnant. The […]
Newsweek‘s Evan Thomas visited Germany recently, and came away thinking the United States is headed for some serious trouble. The country is falling apart—polarized, susceptible to populist demagoguery and so on. Forces on both sides are to blame; they’re not all bad (“I think the Tea Partiers, despite their contradictions, are not all wrong about […]
One gets the impression, reading the New York Times‘ coverage of the WikiLeaks cables, that the paper is particularly interested in documents that portray the State Department in a good light, struggling to do good in a world that continually resists its efforts. Take today’s front-page piece (12/7/10), “America Prods and Protests But Can’t Halt […]
A Washington Post editorial (12/3/10) on the film Fair Game complains that “the film’s reception illustrates a more troubling trend of political debates in Washington in which established facts are willfully ignored.” Talk about lack of self-awareness. The film dramatizes the story of Joseph Wilson, a former ambassador who blew the whistle on the Bush […]
As you may have heard, the White House-backed deficit commission failed to gain a supermajority vote to support a proposal from co-chairs Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson. Their suggestions came under sharp criticism from liberal and progressive critics. Butthe December 3 broadcast of the PBS NewsHour, a short report on that failure was tilted heavily […]
New York Times public editor Arthur Brisbane wrote a response (of a sort) to the criticisms that the paper’s reporting on Iranian missiles was fundamentally flawed. It’s hard to believe thathis column was meant be taken seriously. To review: The Times published a story, based ona WikiLeaks cable,onNovember 29 alleging that Iran possesses powerful missiles […]
NewYork Times (12/3/10): Mr. Karzai first burst onto the international stage in the style of Che Guevara, slipping over the Afghan border from Pakistan in 2001 as United States forces pounded the Taliban, before being installed by the West. President George W. Bush invited him to his first State of the Union speech after September […]
In today’s Washington Post (12/2/10), in the news article “Deficit Commission Sets Ideology Aside,” reporters Lori Montgomery and Brady Dennis explain why the commission is not ideological: Confronted with a deficit-reduction plan loaded with political dynamite, members from both parties set aside ideological orthodoxy at least briefly, sparking hope that their work could ignite a […]
They don’t show–at least in any significant way, with the caveat that thousands of e-mails still remain to be released–the U.S. government seriously misleading its allies. They don’t show unauthorized war, fraudulent procurement practices or unexpected assassination. They don’t show America forming significant alliances with sworn enemies or visiting unexpected deceit on friends. –James Rainey […]
If a single foreign national is rounded up and put in jail because of a leaked cable, this entire, anarchic exercise in “freedom” stands as a human disaster. Assange is a criminal. He’s the one who should be in jail. –Joe Klein, Swampland (12/1/10) Actually, Julian Assange didn’t leak anything–he can’t, because he didn’t […]
As Peter Hart noted earlier, New York Times political reporter Matt Bai has a piece today (12/1/10) critical of Barack Obama for being “loath to publicly disown his base.” Bai writes of Obama: “Since he isn’t willing to break publicly with liberals, independent and conservative voters tend to see him as a tool of the […]
Last night’s broadcast of the PBS NewsHour (11/29/10) offered a discussion of the WikiLeaks documents. Who were the guests? As Judy Woodruff announced: “We turn to two former national security advisers with extensive experience in making and carrying out U.S. foreign policy. “ That would be Carter’s Zbigniew Brzezinski and George W. Bush’s Stephen Hadley. […]
WikiLeaks document dumps are largely what media want to make of them. There’s one conventional response, which goes something like this: “There’s nothing new here, but WikiLeaks is dangerous!” But there’s another option: “There’s nothing here, except for the part that confirms a storyline we’ve been pushing.” In those cases, WikiLeaks is deemed very, […]
Right here on November 12, we asked what the New York Times means when it talks about “centrism”– specifically when it comes to Beltway deficit reduction plans. The Times framed the proposal from deficit commission co-chairs Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson as offering the Obama White House an opening to move to the center. That […]
From Sunday’s Washington Post (11/28/10): FBI Foils Elaborate Bomb Plot in Oregon Given the circumstances of this particular case (covered in great detail by Glenn Greenwald), I think the Post meant either “FBI Concocts Elaborate Bomb Plot in Oregon” or”FBI Foils Its Own Elaborate Bomb Plot in Oregon.”Even the Post‘s own account explained in the […]
From one of the Washington Post‘s stories about WikiLeaks: A senior U.S. intelligence officer, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to be identified, said: “No one should think of American diplomats as spies. But our diplomats do, in fact, help add to our country’s body of knowledge on a wide […]
Yesterday (11/22/10) Jackson Diehl of the Washington Post wrote a column headlined “Obama’s Foreign Policy Needs an Update,” where he worried that the White House suffers from a”lack of grand strategy — or strategists. Its top foreign-policy makers are a former senator, a Washington lawyer and a former Senate staffer. There is no Henry Kissinger, […]
If you had concluded that the Afghan War was in disarray, the front page of the New York Times today probably didn’t do much to change your mind: Taliban Leader in Secret Talks Was an Impostor By DEXTER FILKINS and CARLOTTA GALL KABUL, Afghanistan – For months, the secret talks unfolding between Taliban and Afghan […]
In today’s New York Times (11/22/10), Kim Severson covers the annual protest at the U.S. military training facility formerly known as the School of Americas. The point of the story, though, is that the protests aren’t such a big deal anymore (the headline: “Fort Benning Protest Dwindles, if Not Its Passion.”) The dismissive tone was […]
There’s a lot to say about Ethan Bronner’s Week in Review piece in the New York Times (11/21/10). The headline says a lot on its own: “Why America Chases an Israeli-Palestinian Peace.” This is ironic, at the very least, given the role the U.S. has historically played in making peace quite difficult. And the current […]
