FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
The “media bias” against Sarah Palin is a key ingredient of the conservative victimology of 2008, even though when you see negative reports about Palin these days, they’re generally sourced to her erstwhile Republican colleagues—and corporate media sometimes go to absurd lengths to give the attacks a semi-positive spin, as in this Alessandra Stanley piece […]
News Corpse blogger Mark Howard chronicles (11/12/08) how “pundits like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, etc.” are not just “on the wrong side of public opinion in the recently concluded election,” but “are also losing listeners and viewers who are rapidly awakening to the dishonesty and hostility wafting through the conservative media’s airwaves”: In […]
Beneath the TPM Café headline “Excitement Is Not Hysteria” (11/11/08), critic William Hartung takes on a Washington Post op-ed that gets scary about those celebrations of Barack Obama’s election: According to Anne Applebaum… the excitement around the world about the election of Barack Obama has reached the point of “mass hysteria.”… She says the following: […]
“A bizarre report from Julie Rovner [of All Things Considered] on healthcare reform and the recent election” catches the attention (11/11/08) of NPR Check‘s Mytwords, since, he notes, “as everyone knows the the voters who helped elect Obama president want and expect major healthcare reform”: Explaining the reasons why even reform (instead of complete overhaul) […]
A current CNN interview of Sarah Palin gives the failed candidate yet more airtime in which she, in the words of In These Times editor Jarrett Dapier, “continues her campaign against Barack Obama and again calls forth the specter of Bill Ayers.” Wolf Blitzer opens the door wide yet again by asking her about her […]
Writing on his Consortium News website (11/11/08), Robert Parry warns Barack Obama–who “is being told to forego investigations of George W. Bush’s war crimes“–to “Beware the Lessons of ’93” when “the last Democratic president got burned with similar advice.” Parry lays odds that “had the full stories [of George H. W. Bush’s Iran/Contra involvement] been […]
The Wall Street Journal has named right-winger Gerard Baker (formerly at the Times of London) its new deputy editor-in-chief. This reaction I find somewhat puzzling: It would be one thing for Baker to move to the conservative editorial page, but the self-described “right-wing curmudgeon” will have a role overseeing news coverage, a move that surprised […]
Hearing Joe Scarborough utter “the phrase ‘fuck you’ when discussing Obama’s appointment of Rahm Emanuel” on MSNBC, Salon‘s Green Greenwald states (11/10/08, ad-viewing required) that he “couldn’t care any less”–except that he just can’t stomach the immense hypocrisy of “one of the most zealous crusaders against such awful filth on television”: Scarborough led the lynch […]
Fresh off successes in mobilizing people to pressure the FCC to condemn Comcast censorship and wrest “white spaces” from corporate control, Free Press has a new Internet for Everyone project announcing (11/11/08) their Los Angeles Town Hall event to “Kick-Start the Movement to Make an Internet Connection a Right of Every American”: The meeting–to be […]
The Media Matters staff has more (11/7/08) on the prominent press fallacy of “a ‘center-right’ country”: In a November 7 Washington Times column, [Heritage Foundation president Ed] Feulner claimed that Obama “campaigned on conservative themes throughout the fall,” and that Obama “took some conservative positions on issues like taxes (promising to cut them).” Yet prior […]
Award-winning U.S. News & World Report reporter Kenneth Walsh (11/10/08) joins in the media chorus urging Barack Obama and the Democrats to move to the right–for their own good, of course: The initial indications are that Obama will start in the center…. One reason, Democratic advisers say, is that so many new members of Congress […]
Joshua Holland (AlterNet, 11/10/08) offers “more evidence that much of the traditional media’s analysis of American politics is utterly worthless, and should probably just be ignored out of hand”: Only moments after the networks declared Barack Obama the winner of a dramatic realignment election, William Bennett, the conservative icon, declared on CNN that “America is […]
New reports of civilian casualties in Afghanistan (37 dead) were covered in the Los Angeles Times on Sunday. The story provides a decent sense of thedeath toll, but near the end makes a rather bizarre point (see bold): Afghan weddings are traditionally large, drawn-out affairs, and wedding parties several times have been the target of […]
Economist Dean Baker catches (Beat the Press, 11/8/08) a Washington Post piece that “tells us how the people who designed the bank bailout were committed to the free market.” But Baker is intrigued to note that, “interestingly, the key decisions that they made gave the banks much better terms than they could have received from […]
Blogger Mytwords’ monitoring (NPR Check, 11/10/08) of National Public Radio finds Weekend Edition Saturday host Scott Simon putting a shine on those two pillars of nationalism–God and country. He was having a little chat with two of Billy Graham‘s shysters grandchildren who have written a book glorifying their humble grandpa who lived in a “log […]
Currently a well-respected and widely published educator, Bill Ayers discusses the periodic “media episodes of fleeting notoriety” around his former membership in the Weather Underground–“it was always a bit surreal. Then came this political season”–and charts (In These Times, 11/7/08) how the ’08 campaign mania around him was amplified while bouncing from political operatives to […]
Recent Nobel laureate Paul Krugman uses his New York Times column (11/7/08) to answer the “many commentators” who are urging Mr. Obama to think small. Some make the case on political grounds: America, they say, is still a conservative country, and voters will punish Democrats if they move to the left. Others say that the […]
Corporate media may have belatedly embraced the historic black power gestures of 1968 Olympic medalists Tommie Smith and John Carlos, but sports media critic Dave Zirin tells (Nation, 11/7/08) of how a modern-day version by one NFL player drew immediate condemnation: [Denver Broncos receiver Brandon] Marshall’s plan was to score a touchdown on Thursday night […]
Following the lead of the New York Times, which had a similar story (11/2/08) right before the election, Newsweek‘s Dan Ephron has a piece (11/7/08) on “The Gitmo Dilemma,” explaining why Obama “won’t close the controversial prison soon.” Like the Times story, Newsweek struggles to complicate a simple situation. The U.S. had three things it […]
Writing on the military paper’s blog (11/5/08), Stars and Stripes ombud Dave Mazzarella tears down the Pentagon reasoning from trying to block reporters from having contact with military personnel on Election Day: What servicemembers say while in uniform can be construed as a position of the Department of Defense, the officials said. No matter that […]
