FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
The New York Times has an interesting profile today (10/18/11) of a retired Wall Street trader named Robert Halper who, it turns out, made an early donation to Adbusters to help with the Occupy Wall Street movement: Mr. Halper, who lives on the Upper West Side, had long been a supporter of the magazine, donating […]
On his MSNBC show (10/15/11), Chris Hayes went through the NBC archives to look at Martin Luther King’s appearances on Meet the Press. He was struck by the tone of the questions King was asked–and the show put together this clip reel (apologies for the ad you’re likely to be forced to watch before the […]
Squint or you’ll miss it–the Sunday front page of the Washington Post: In case you’re having trouble finding it, it’s in the lower right-hand corner: a blurb approximately one column inch long, directing people to page A20 to find news about protests in solidarity with Occupy Wall Street in “more than 900 cities in Europe, […]
The new Time poll that found the public more favorably inclined towards Occupy Wall Street protesters than the Tea Party has been making the rounds. From the magazine’s write-up of the poll: A new Time/ABT SRBI poll finds 54 percent of Americans have a favorable view of the new protest movement, despite the images of […]
Last night’s O’Reilly Factor (10/13/11), with guest Megyn Kelly, talking about how to deal with Iran: BILL O’REILLY: What do we do? MEGYN KELLY: It’s a political question for President Obama and a military question for him, but it’s not really much of a legal question because legally he can do it. O’REILLY: OK. KELLY: […]
Corporate media’s incredibly uncritical boosterism of so-called “free trade” deals has been remarked on many times, and continues to be remarkable. What else but blind faith would allow a story to carry a line like one in the October 12 New York Times, about textile industry opposition to the new deal with South Korea: “The […]
Without further evidence, the alleged Iranian plot to assassinate Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to the United States is rather hard to believe. See Glenn Greenwald’s take, for example, to appreciate the need for skepticism about U.S. claims–and the eagerness of many elite pundits to take the government story more or less at face value. Jim Lobe’s […]
NBC Nightly News (10/7/11) marked the 10th anniversary of the Afghan War on October 7 with a segment that linked the war to the Occupy Wall Street protests. As anchor Brian Williams put it in the introduction: Tonight protesters remain in the streets of a dozen U.S. cities, angry over what’s happened to their lives […]
NBC Meet the Press host David Gregory, interviewing Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel on Sunday (10/10/11): GREGORY: What’s going on in the streets of Occupy Wall Street? EMANUEL: Yeah. GREGORY: Complaining about the unfairness, railing against Wall Street. The president has sympathized with those protesters in the street. Is demonizing Wall Street the way to create […]
Leave it to the New York Times (10/7/11) to find a guy collecting unemployment who opposes the extension of unemployment benefits. He’s “Dan Tolleson, a researcher and writer with a Ph.D. in politics…whose last good job was working for a group that aims to replace the income tax with a national sales tax.” But don’t […]
In the When Will They Learn? department, incoming National Public Radio president Gary Knell seems to suffer from the same misunderstanding that has plagued public broadcasting executives for years. NPR media correspondent David Folkenflik reports that Knell says he hopes to “calm the waters a bit” at NPR after recent political controversies, and to “depoliticize” […]
It sounded like it, but it was just Bill O’Reilly channeling Beck’s Soros/MoveOn/Big Labor paranoia, minus the chalkboard: On Wednesday in New York City, there was another far-left demonstration as a bunch of people marched on Wall Street. Why? We aren’t exactly sure. What we do know is that these folks are zealots who are […]
New York Times business writer Andrew Ross Sorkin has been criticized for being too chummy with the Wall Street tycoons he’s supposed to be covering. Today he has a piece in the Times (10/4/11) about Occupy Wall Street–which he’s decided to check out because it’s beginning to make some CEOs nervous: I had gone down […]
I checked out a post from the Web-based publication Capital (9/28/11) about media coverage of the Occupy Wall Street protest because CJR (9/29/11) told me it was a “smart post” that “crunched the numbers” and showed “how there really is no media blackout.” I have to say I would have thought CJR would have higher […]
A full-page ad in USA Today reminded me that today is the debut of Erin Burnett’s CNN show OutFront. Burnett gained a following at CNBC, and came to the attention of many conservatives with a report on the Today show (7/17/07) that managed to touch on almost every conservative myth about the economy, earning praise […]
The New York Times had a headline on Saturday that read, “Imagining a Christie Campaign for President.” That seems appropriate–if we’re talking about how it’s the corporate media doing the imagining. On ABC‘s This Week (10/2/11), Jonathan Karl announced that New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie‘s speech at the Reagan Library “was the most electrifying event […]
Under the somewhat nonsensical headline, “Wall Street Demonstrations Test Police Trained for Bigger Threats,” New York Times reporter Joseph Goldstein may have managed to turn in (9/27/11) a more offensive piece than Ginia Bellafante’s June 25 dispatch (picked apart by Allison Kilkenny here). The piece begins: When members of the loose protest movement known as […]
It is very unusual to see such direct criticism of the New York Times in the Times itself (9/27/11)–this is something to celebrate. To the Editor: Anyone who has spent a few days–or nights–in occupied Zuccotti Park near Wall Street this past week would have trouble recognizing what they’ve seen in “Gunning for Wall Street, […]
ABC This Week (9/25/11): CHRISTINE AMANPOUR: And coming up, Rick Perry on the ropes. PERRY: Yep, there may be slicker candidates and there may be smoother debaters, but I know what I believe in, and I’m going to stand on that belief every day. I will guide this country with a deep, deep rudder. AMANPOUR: […]
There’s a piece at the CBS website (9/21/11) by Robert Hendin marking Bob Schieffer‘s 20 years hosting the network’s Sunday morning show Face the Nation. Hendin, a senior producer for the show, writes: From the get go, Bob made his plans known. “Our aim is to going to be very simple here: to find interesting […]
