FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
Time magazine tells us about Obama’s chief economic adviser: His controversial comments about women’s aptitude for math and science were a reminder that he operates best when he is working behind the scenes. Oh, so that was the lesson. I had been under the misapprehension that the lesson had something to do with Larry Summers’ […]
The headline (and subhead) in today’s print edition: National Security Team Would Be Diverse Mix Obama Picks Span Eras; Some Espouse More Centrist Views And what, exactly, makes for a “diverse mix?” Holding “moderate” views against a troop withdrawal from Iraq, apparently: Obama’s latest picks would give him a foreign policy team with a moderate […]
Is the total frenzy over post-Thanksgiving shopping a recent creation? That’s what David Carr writes in the New York Times today: Media and retail outfits are economic peas in a pod. Part of the reason that the Thanksgiving newspaper and local morning television show are stuffed with soft features about shopping frenzies is that they […]
Two disappointing reports in major newspapers on the healthcare debate. In the Los Angeles Times, Noam Levey writes (“Consensus Emerging on Universal Healthcare“) that the momentum for real change is obvious in Washington–but that it only goes so far: The idea of a federal, single-payer system patterned on those in Europe and Canada, long a […]
ZNet has Noam Chomsky‘s in-depth analysis (11/25/08) of the recent U.S. presidential election–its likely ramifications, and its overall democratic qualities as compared to other countries. Chomsky here addresses the corporate media aspect: In the liberal Boston Globe, the headline of the lead story observed that Obama’s “grassroots strategy leaves few debts to interest groups”: labor […]
The folks at Free Press recount (11/25/08) how, “when St. Paul police launched a violent crackdown on journalists covering the Republican National Convention,” the media reform group “needed an on-the-ground organizer to pressure city officials to drop the charges against the journalists”–luckily they “knew just the person to call: Nancy Doyle Brown of the Twin […]
TV reporter Michael Schneider updates us (Variety, 11/25/08) on Fox‘s race to the ethical bottom of media programming. The real losers? Kids, as usual: In an unprecedented move, Fox will program two hours of longform commercials on Saturday mornings starting in January. That’s believed to be the first time a major network has slated full-blown, […]
Salon‘s Glenn Greenwald contrasts (11/26/08, ad-viewing required) Joe Klein in the current Time magazine declaiming George W. Bush’s “ridiculous, preening appearance in a flight suit on the deck of the aircraft carrier beneath the ‘Mission Accomplished’ sign” as a “defining moment… of the Bush failure” with Klein’s May 4, 2003 Face the Nation response to […]
Obama’s selection of a host of Clinton-era centrists for top posts have been greeted with cheers in the press. ABC‘s George Stephanopoulos gushed that “we have not seen this kind of combination of star power, brain power and political muscle this early in a cabinet in our lifetimes.” Last week, even conservative New York Times […]
This news comes from an AFL-CIO blog (via Adam Serwer at TAPPED): This report likely wonâ┚¬Ã¢”ž¢t be on CNN‘s Headline News, but after five years, former workers at CNN have finally gained justice. In a decision made public today, an administrative law judge ordered the network to rehire 110 workers who were fired because they […]
Anyone who followed the results of Venezuela’s regional elections last Sunday will know that President Hugo Chavez’s party won 17 out of 22 contests up for grabs, garnering 52.5 percent of the popular vote to the opposition’s 41.1 percent. Unless, that is, they were relying on New York Times Latin America correspondent Simon Romero. Despite […]
Eric Hananoki and Lauren Auerbach have a new Media Matters exposé (11/24/08) of how, since the beginning of October, Dick Morris has repeatedly used his columns and Fox News appearances to promote and raise money for the National Republican Trust PAC without disclosing that the organization has paid $24,000 to a company apparently connected to […]
The Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism has unsettling new results (Kaiser Family Foundation, 11/24/08) from a “study of how the U.S. news media covered health issues over an 18-month period from January 2007 through June 2008.” The report “finds that news about health and health care made up less than four percent […]
Under the ironic headline “God Damn The God Damn Liberal Media” (A Tiny Revolution, 11/20/08), Jonathan Schwarz points out an astonishing quote from Scott Horton‘s new article in Harper‘s on creating some kind of accountability for the torture conducted by the Bush administration (subscription required): [I]n a 2006 radio interview, Dick Cheney said simply that […]
Hullabaloo blogger digby deflates (11/21/08) what she says “has actually been an article of faith among the gasbags for a very long time”: Until recently, what they proclaimed (without qualification) was that this was a “conservative country.” The election of a Democrat with a popular mandate required them to change their rhetoric. But it hasn’t […]
Here’s the New York Times (11/24/08), reporting the Citigroup bailout: In tense, round-the-clock negotiations that stretched until almost midnight on Sunday, it became clear that the crisis of confidence had to be defused now or the financial markets could plunge further. Note the absence of any source here–that’s reporter Eric Dash, with the authority of […]
It says something for the weakness of your argument when you have to turn your opponents’ argument on its head. Take the L.A. Times editorial today (11/24/08) headlined “An Unfair Litmus Test.” The editorial claims that “some ardent supporters of Barack Obama are aggrieved because the president-elect’s emergent national security team includes supporters of the […]
The ever-vigilant Electronic Frontier Foundation announces (11/18/08) its representation of “a New York City community organizer [who] is fighting back in court after her parody website challenging redevelopment efforts in New York City’s historic Union Square was shut down with bogus claims of copyright infringement and cybersquatting”: As one part of her education campaign, [Savitri] […]
As George W. Bush prepares to leave office, Ian Williams (Guardian.co.uk, 11/18/08) thinks that what is really in order is some sort of pardon and apology to Dan Rather, who CBS‘s cowardly management squeezed from 60 Minutes for telling the truth about Bush’s war record. Rather’s suit against them, with its accompanying subpoenas, has now […]
In looking at “How Our Gutless Media Helped Trigger the Credit Crisis,” Trudy Lieberman examines (Columbia Journalism Review, 11/20/08) “just one piece of evidence of the decline of the consumer movement, the rise of consumerism to replace it and the media’s role in both trends.” Lieberman recalls then-New York State Gov. Eliot Spitzer’s veto of […]
