FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
There are two major conflicts in Africa that receive U.S. media attention. In Congo, it is estimated that 5 million people have died in a conflict that has raged for about 12 years. In the Darfur region of Sudan, estimates can range from 200,000 to 400,000. The Darfur conflict, though, has received much more press […]
Under the headline “Pollsters Debate America’s Political Realignment,” the Washington Post‘s Robert Kaiser tries to weigh the arguments about the political makeup of the United States in light of the 2008 election. But Kaiser’s rendition of this debate only serves to confuse matters. There are basically two sides to this clash: those who say the […]
The New York Times‘ Week in Review section yesterday (11/23/08) gathered a group of op-eds under the heading “Transitions,” which they described as “a series of Op-Ed articles by experts on the most formidable issues facing the new president.” The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were the topics under examination; we’ve examined who gets to […]
Glenn Greenwald delineates for Salon readers (11/21/08, ad-viewing required) the implications of the Committee to Protect Journalists including a prisoner of U.S. forces on their list of “six journalists who have faced down persecution and grave danger in their line of work”: So, to recap the award winners: We have a reporter persecuted by the […]
Don’t miss this week’s offering on the FAIR radio program CounterSpin (11/21/08): The victory of Proposition 8 in California has, at least for the moment, put the brakes on gay marriage in that state. The post-election recriminations are flying, but the main story we’re hearing is that black voters turned out in droves–to support Barack […]
CounterPunch editor Alexander Cockburn confesses (Nation, 11/19/08) to being moved to violent thoughts “while listening to the McLaughlin Group, all of whom presumably haul home at least $200,000 a year, as they deplored the unconscionable wages of line workers in Detroit”: The same urge flares up when reading the Wall Street Journal‘s editorial page. As […]
In a column in the Baltimore Sun, journalism professor John F. Kirchdoes a quick tally of coverage of third-party presidential candidates in 2008: According to a basic Lexis/Nexis database search of election coverage from August 5 to November 5, the Washington Post and the New York Times published a combined 3,576 news stories, editorials, op-eds, […]
Blogging communications attorney Harold Feld (WetMachine, 11/14/08) thinks he missed a class in law school. Not once in my Administrative Law class did my professor ever tell me that you could respond to a federal investigation by telling the agency, “We know you have authority, but we’d rather not answer these questions because you are […]
Via Beat the Press: Saying he “might expect it from right-leaning commentators like Will Wilkinson” but not “from someone like Mark Perry, who lives in Flint, Michigan,” Felix Salmon of Portfolio notes (11/18/04) that “all of them are perpetuating the meme that the average GM worker costs more than $70 an hour, once you include […]
Responding (11/13/08) to those “who would argue that the election of the first African-American president signaled the country has moved past the need to be concerned about racial equity,” PBS.org‘s Dori J. Maynard writes that it is true that some television networks put on air more African-American commentators during the campaign. Those additional voices, however, […]
In “Clout Has Plunged for Automakers and Union, Too,” the New York Times‘ Micheline Maynard makes this curious observation: [GM CEO Rick ]Wagoner and Ron Gettelfinger, head of the UAW, appeared on local TV in Detroit this week, but no Detroit representatives landed spots on the Sunday morning talk shows out of Washington. Senator Levin […]
Via A Tiny Revolution, a reminder from Vanity Fair website contributor Peter Newcomb (11/14/08) of the unspoken motivations of a bazillionaire pundit writing an enormously influential column on economics: It would be easy to dismiss today’s rant… by New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman as yet another ideological tirade against the U.S. automobile industry. But […]
Posting on Editor & Publisher‘s E&P Pub blog (11/17/08), Greg Mitchell has more on “Misleading Parents After Their Kids Are Killed in War”: Battle fatalities are way down in Iraq, thank goodness (though not Afghanistan), but many U.S. troops are still passing away in “noncombat” ways, via accidents, friendly fire, suicides and so on. And […]
From his perch over at Salon, Glenn Greenwald (11/18/08, ad-viewing required) sees “nothing new” in the current media craze for “bipartisanship“: “To the contrary, the last eight years have been defined, more than anything else, by overarching bipartisan cooperation and consensus.” Where is the evidence of the supposed partisan wrangling that we hear so much […]
Dean Baker makes a particularly sharp point (Beat the Press, 11/18/08) when trying to “imagine that the economy in Venezuela gets really bad in the next few years.” He asks if the Washington Post would then “write about how Hugo Chávez had to cope with enormous economic turmoil?” but decides “that’s unlikely. The Post would […]
Rolling Stone reporter Matt Taibbi‘s look back (11/13/08) at his experience covering the ’08 presidential campaign features this response to Hillary Clinton adviser Mark Penn calling her “a workhorse”: “‘Are you implying,’ snaps one reporter, ‘that Barack Obama is not a workhorse?’” This is what qualifies as a tough question on the campaign trail. The […]
As well as being infused with a modern-day “white man’s burden” mythology not exactly unheard of in media reporting on Somalia, Time magazine’s article “The Suffering of Somalia” (11/13/08) follows the well-documented pattern of misreporting on recent U.S. intervention on Somalia (see Extra!, 3-4/08)–downplaying the disastrous role of recent U.S. policy in that country: Somalia […]
On Fox News Sunday (11/16/08), NPR reporter Mara Liasson offered her take (which was essentially the same as neo-con co-panelist Bill Kristol) on why picking Hillary Clinton for Secretary of State would be good for Barack Obama: In terms of Obama, I think he wants–it would send a lot of important signals. Number one, she […]
The New York Times‘ Jonathan Hicks (11/17/08), writing about newly elected Staten Island Rep. Michael McMahon: Mr. McMahon…stresses his working-class roots, telling voters of his Irish fatherâ┚¬Ã¢”ž¢s lifelong job as an insurance underwriter. That must be the same working class that Bill O’Reilly comes from.
A new media watchdog series, the IFC Media Project, makesits debut tonight on the Independent Film Channel. Host Gideon Yago has spent time at MTV and CBS, experiences that he tells the New York Times helped turn him into a media critic: In an interview last week, he said he had watched “news stories that […]
