FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
La Frontera Times reporter Alfredo Gutierrez has the latest (2/6/09) from new Fox reality show star Joe Arpaio. The Arizona sheriff, under FBI investigation for violating civil rights in his crusade against immigration, recently marched all of the Maricopa County immigrant detainees–chained together in full prisoner uniforms–down the street “from the Durango Jail to the […]
The folks at Think Progress recently brought us “a report showing that, in the debate over the House economic recovery bill on the five cable news networks, Republican members of Congress outnumbered their Democratic counterparts by a ratio of 2 to 1.” Now that the legislation “passed the House last week with zero Republican votes, […]
Editor & Publisher‘s Greg Mitchell gives another glimpse (Mother Jones, 2/5/09) at his Why Obama Won book, which found “reporters and pundits focused on flag pins, bowling and fairly trivial faux pas”–thus yielding “far more media lowlights than highlights.” Resisting the urge to “do a full article just on William Kristol‘s errors and flubs at […]
It’s disturbing enough to read Chris Tomlinson’s account (Huffington Post, 2/5/09) of the fact that “the Pentagon now spends more than $550 million a year–at least double the amount since 2003–on public affairs, and that doesn’t including personnel costs” and how “over the past two years, the number of public affairs officers trained by the […]
We noted recently Fox News‘ peculiar understanding of the Fair Use doctrine, which allows writers, artists and others to make reasonable use of copyrighted material so long as they don’t infringe on the copyright owners’ commercial rights; Fox interprets this to mean that critics should only be allowed to make use of Fox video if […]
Walter Isaacson’s Time cover story (“Howto Save Your Newspaper”) finds the magazine’s former editor offering advice for the ailing corporate media. As he (and others in the business) see it, the problem is that newsis now being consumed onlinefor free, which of course makes it difficult to turn a profit (or, more to the point, […]
Washington Report on Middle East Affairs‘ Michael Gillespie (1-2/09) saw Alison Weir of If Americans Knew speak about her group’s “look at a category that would be universally accepted as significant and quantifiable” to examine U.S. media coverage of the Israel’s occupation of Palestine: “We settled on coverage of deaths among both populations.” Explaining that […]
How distorted is the corporate media concept of critical journalism? Just look at Media Matters‘ write up (2/5/09) of a cable news show that named one commentator its “Muckraker of the Day” for presenting bogus evidence against global warming: On the February 2 edition of MSBNC‘s 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, anchor David Shuster let syndicated columnist […]
Wendy Norris of the Colorado Independent (2/2/09) reports that the “National Hispanic Media Coalition is urging the FCC to explore the extent, effects and potential counter-responses to ethnic bias on radio” and “probe whether there is a connection between odious radio yakking and hate crimes.” The coalition’s latest focus is a UCLA Chicano Studies Research […]
Having been traveling, Salon.com‘s Glenn Greenwald (2/4/09, ad-viewing required) found himself “subjected to far more cable news over the last 24 hours than I typically endure in an entire month.” Some results from Greenwald’s impromptu casual survey: The consensus regarding Tom Daschle seems to be that his withdrawal was necessitated due to (a) Obama’s incessant […]
The tiny West Los Angeles Daily Breeze gets props for running the Council on American-Islamic Relations’ Munira Syeda critique (2/1/09) asserting that “any objective report card on the American media coverage of Israel’s war on Gaza would have a grade of ‘C’ at best”: For the most part, the mainstream media reported on the conflict […]
Norman Solomon’s latest column (Creators Syndicate, 1/31/09) looks over a decade in which “the false truism of Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction led to the horrors of the Iraq invasion and occupation,” and “in the wake of 9/11, overall, the main journalistic outlets of the United States fed us falsehoods, hysteria, self-righteousness and endless […]
New York Times reporters Ethan Bronner and Sabrina Tavernise went to Gaza (2/4/09) to look into stories of civilian atrocities, and turned up some very powerful examples. Unfortunately, the impact of that reporting was undermined by the all-too-familiar tendency to “balance” these facts with criticisms of Palestinians. Fora piece that is attempting to get a […]
There’s a trope that you often see in corporate media discussions of the stimulus plan: Yeah, but do you really want to spend money on that? It may have started with the misrepresented contraceptive plan—which seemed to be grounded in a traditional media fascination/embarrassment at anything involving sex—but now it’s moved on to anything that…well, […]
CBS Evening News anchor Katie Couric (1/27/09) introduced a segment on civilian casualties in Afghanistan by saying, “Our Elizabeth Palmer spoke with the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, who says the Taliban have become masters of manipulating public opinion.” That commander, Gen. David McKiernan, was CBS’s sole on-camera source for the segment, making assertions like […]
The roundtable on Sunday’s Meet the Press (2/1/09) sure didn’t look promising: Republican flat tax enthusiast Steve Forbes, former McCain economic adviser Mark Zandi and CNBC reporter Erin Burnett. It was Burnett, though, who delivered a head-scratching defense of the$18 billion bonuses recently doled out at Wall Street firms (many of which are still standing […]
Sometimes iconoclastic Washington pundit E. J. Dionne Jr. comes up with a winner (Washington Post, 2/2/09) in this description of the crucial media role in political chicanery on the national level: If achieving bipartisanship takes priority over the actual content of policy, Republicans are handed a powerful weapon. In theory, they can keep moving the […]
Jonathan Schwarz gives his answer (A Tiny Revolution, 2/1/09) to Political Animal blogger Steve Benen’s question of “why the [Washington] Post‘s op-ed editors feel compelled to publish the same misguided piece from [Amity] Shlaes, making the same misguided argument every month or so”: “Shlaes is employed by the Council on Foreign Relations to lie about […]
Marina Litvinsky’s Inter Press Service review (1/31/09) of “U.S. television coverage of the recent three-week conflict in the Gaza Strip” comes to the unsurprising conclusion that TV journalists “failed to tell both sides of the story, according to a number of media analysts.” But a larger trend is in evidence too: “The most recent conflict… […]
Public Citizen attorney Paul Alan Levy’s news (1/30/09) of bloggers’ win over Fox News provides a dark glimpse into the network’s anti-Fair Use machinations: Public Citizen, which represented ProgressIllinois.com in this matter, tried to talk to Fox about its claim filed under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and discuss possible guidelines for future use, […]
