FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
Sean Hannity is a great American. You can hear it every day on his national radio show, where the standard caller greeting to the host is, “Sean, you’re a great American!” The catchphrase is so well-known, it’s been commercialized! And who is more patriotic than Hannity, who uses his daily radio and Fox News Channel […]
Today’s L.A. Times report (2/26/09) on the White House budget includes this curious warning: The document–which included broad goals and few line items–laid down controversial markers on almost every major issue facing the country. Among the immediate budget winners are the middle class and the poor, whose taxes will be eased. Among the losers are […]
Lamenting the fact that “commercial radio stations everywhere have been swallowed up by a handful of giant corporations, playlists have shrunk and local and independent acts have been drowned out,” Free Press activist Timothy Karr (MediaCitizen, 2/26/09) also lets us know that the good news is that your rescue is at hand. On Tuesday, Reps. […]
Media writer Nat Ives (AdvertisingAge.com, 2/23/09) throws some cold water on overheated reportage of “all the apocalyptic news about newspapers”: Even as they take blow after blow from recession and digital media, newspapers themselves still earn decent profits…. “Not a lot of papers are operating at a loss,” said John Morton, the veteran industry analyst. […]
You’d think that reporting on federal budget bills costing billions of dollars would be difficult. But it’s easy, really: All you have to do is remember that budget items involving animals or unusual foods are funny. ABC‘s Jonathan Karl has mastered the genre. Reporting on the ominous spending bill (World News, 2/24/09), he declared: “The […]
This AP “fact check” (2/24/09) of President Barack Obama’s speech is, as usual, a sad effort. You really need to have some threshold for calling “gotcha,” and some of these—maybe all of these—really don’t measure up. Obama says, “Regulations were gutted for the sake of a quick profit at the expense of a healthy market,” […]
Industry news outlet TV Predictions has a commentary from Phillip Swann (2/22/09) telling us that when “roughly 36 percent” of local television stations recently stopped broadcasting ahead of the digital conversion deadline (“stations save money by switching early because they would no longer have to transmit both analog and digital signals”), “the FCC received more […]
Ryan Chittum of CJR.org holds up (2/19/09) Rick Santelli’s recent CNBC tantrum as “an example of what’s wrong with a certain kind of financial journalism, the kind where people of like backgrounds spend all day staring at tickers and interviewing each other. As such, Chittum says, “the segment couldn’t more clearly illustrate the disconnect between […]
Media Matters (2/24/09) catches AP reporter Liz Sidoti garbling Barack Obama’s position on entitlements: He called the long-term solvency of Social Security “the single most pressing fiscal challenge we face by far” and said reforming healthcare, including burgeoning entitlement programs, was a huge priority. What Obama actually said was: In the coming years, we’ll be […]
Jackie Calmes reports in the New York Times (2/23/09): The president signaled in his campaign that he would support addressing the retirement system’s looming financing shortfall, in part by applying payroll taxes to incomes above $250,000. But that would ignite intense opposition from Republicans, especially with the economy deep in recession. Liberal Democrats are already […]
David Gregory sticking up for bank stockholders on Meet the Press (2/22/09): There’s a larger point here, which is, first of all, the more…the shares of…these banks gets talked down…the closer you get to wiping out the shareholder completely. And it’s, it’s not clear to me that everybody understands that the investor in this country, […]
Raw Story (2/22/09) has a report that illustrates, in passing, the ridiculousness of how copyright law is applied on the Internet. The story concerns a McDonald’s employee in Arkansas who threw an abusive customer out of the restaurant and got shot, and the hamburger company’s refusal to pay the injured employer workers compensation because the […]
Economics blogger Dean Baker asserts that “about the only thing that readers can learn from an article on Japan in the business section today” is that “The New York Times Doesn’t Like Japan” (Beat the Press, 2/22/09). Among the piece’s “variety of complaints about Japan’s economy, many of which are contradictory,” is “the standard line […]
The Sacramento Unit of the California Media Workers Guild has published (BeeGuildNow.org, 2/16/09) an open letter to McClatchy CEO Gary Pruitt describing how, in quick succession, our salaries and our pensions have been frozen. The company match has been eliminated from our 401K plans. Weâ┚¬Ã¢”ž¢ve gone through two rounds of buyouts. Our ranks are thinner. […]
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 […]
While the U.S. economy’s current ills have proven “that the people who run Citigroup, J.P. Morgan, Wells and other major financial institutions may not be the sharpest knives in the drawer,” Dean Baker (Beat the Press, 2/18/09) wants to know, “How much do taxpayers have to cough up to make up for their ineptitude?”: David […]
Even though “Al Jazeera English is also on the cusp of a carriage deal in Canada,” Broadcasting & Cable‘s Marisa Guthrie reports (2/18/09) that the channel has “had little luck getting picked up by U.S. cable and satellite providers.” As part of an effort to “appeal to consumers via a grassroots marketing campaign that attempts […]
“A rather major problem with nearly all of NPR‘s reporting” has been identified by NPR Check blogger Mytwords (2/18/09) and named the “history scrub.” The definition: “If the essential background history to a story reflects poorly on the actions of the U.S. government–that history will be deleted, scrubbed, sanitized–sent down the memory hole.” The key […]
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, […]
Today’s New York Times features a piece by Thom Shanker that dwells on suspected budget cuts at the Pentagon. As the headline tells us, “After Stimulus Package, Pentagon Officials Are Preparing to Pare Back.” The piece gives little reason to believe that there are any such plans afoot; Obama did not campaign on cutting the […]
