FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
Via the Southern Poverty Law Center’s HateWatch, the Tucson Citizen‘s Anne T. Denogean says (10/14/08) it “isn’t too surprising” that the Pew Hispanic Center’s polling found, among other disturbing results, “one in seven Hispanics said they had trouble finding or keeping a job because of their ethnicity. One in 10 reported that their ethnicity made […]
After “more than a decade” of having “attempted to cast a light on… ‘that curriculum of the corporation, by the corporation and for a corporation’s profits… [which] shall indeed hasten the rate of destruction of the earth’s resources,’” John F. Borowski offers instruction (Common Dreams, 10/20/08) to Journalists: Expose the agenda of this corrosive curriculum. […]
Blogger JayaPrakash Telangana has posted (Japes, 10/21/08) a Free Press Action Fund call to “make sure media help us spot and overcome national crises, instead of distracting us with celebrities and trivia.” Free Press‘s Martin Kaplan and Norman Lear ask us to “just thinkâ┚¬Ã‚¦”: If mainstream media spent as much time covering the events that […]
The New York Observer‘s Felix Gillette brings our attention (10/20/08) to a new self-described “grassroots” website created after “NBC/MSNBC was criticized during the 2008 election for sexism in its coverage.” Founder Margot Friedman further explains that “picking a qualified woman and/or person of color to host Meet the Press would help repair some of the […]
Speaking of Mark Halperin, the Politico‘s Michael Calderone notes that while Time‘s Joe Klein seems to have been banned from the McCain press plane for being too critical (“We don’t allow Daily Kos diarists on board either,” a McCain spokesperson says), “other Time magazine staffers, including Washington bureau chief Jay Carney, ” reporter Michael Scherer […]
On CNN‘s Reliable Sources (10/19/08), host Howard Kurtz and Time magazine’s Mark Halperin had the following exchange: KURTZ: Mark Halperin, we learned this morning that Barack Obama in the month of September raised $150 million…. If a Republican had not taken public financing and had raised all that money, and the Democrat was struggling financially, […]
Howard Kurtz once had a well-deserved reputation for going the extra distance to check what he printed. What happened to that reporter?
From the New York Times report on Barack Obama’s huge rally in St. Louis: Even Mr. Obama, who can wear self-possession like an overcoat, seemed taken aback. Translation? Also in the Times on Sunday, Matt Bai’s magazine piece about Obama and white voters included this observation: Obama was wearing his classic starched white shirt. (How […]
Bill Kristol writes in his column in the New York Times today that media elites like telling us what’s going to happen. They’re always annoyed when people cross them. Pundits spent all spring telling Hillary Clinton to give up in her contest against Obama–and the public kept on ignoring them and keeping her hopes alive. […]
A Google News search for the term “William Timmons” yields trusty progressive publications like Think Progress, OpEd News, TPM, AlterNet and Democracy Now!, but days after it appeared at Huffington Post (10/14/08), no “mainstream” U.S. outlet has picked up the intrepid Murray Waas‘ new exposé on how Timmons, the Washington lobbyist who John McCain has […]
The most quoted intellectual in the entire world, Noam Chomsky, happens to live in the United States–but in order to have his say about the upcoming U.S. presidential election he must go to a non-corporate Canadian outlet (Real News, 10/20/08), where he suggests “voting against McCain, which means voting for Obama–without illusions”: It’s not that […]
Anthony DiMaggio finds (ZNet, 10/19/08) “the massive attention surrounding ACORN” as much evidence of “media racism as it is their class prejudice”: In danger of losing its eight year hold on the Presidency, the Republican Party has become increasingly desperate in its attacks on poor and minority groups, who have registered in increasingly large numbers […]
Disgusted that “the three participants in the third U.S. presidential debate last week pretended Iraq didn’t exist,” David Swanson tells OpEd News readers (10/18/08) of the residents of a devastated Baghdad “are “managing major rallies of tens of thousands of people in opposition to the treaty to extend the occupation for three more years (and […]
As campaign reporters run wild with spurious accounts of vote fraud by left-wing bogeyman ACORN, Rolling Stone has published (10/30/08) Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s and Greg Palast’s most recent warning of the real ballot threat: The new registrations thrown out, the existing registrations scrubbed, the spoiled ballots, the provisional ballots that were never counted–and what […]
It should be noted that Jon Meacham’s Newsweek cover story–dissected here–is matched in the magazine by a “Counterpoint” from columnist Jonathan Alter. It’s instructive to see the arguments side by side; Meacham argues for a center-right America (more right than center, it would seem), while Alter argues that, “since about 1980, we’ve been living in […]
There is plenty one could say about the New York Times‘ October 19 report on allegations of Iranian training of Iraq insurgents. The Times points out up front that the information is derived from “accounts given to American interrogators by captured Iraqi fighters.” Under what circumstances were the Iraqis interrogated? The paper doesn’t say. The […]
On Sunday, the New York Times and Washington Post labeled protests against a possible U.S./Iraqi security agreement as primarly the work of followers of cleric Muqtada al-Sadr; the Post‘s headline was “Sadr Loyalists Protest Proposed U.S. Presence,” while the Times was somewhat muddled, leading with language about the marchers being Sadr followers, but also noting […]
What happens after your credulous reporting helps sell the public argument on the case for the Iraq invasion, and your name becomes more or less synonymous with the broad media failures on the war? You get hired by Fox News, according to today’s Washington Post. Fox‘s John Moody’s comments are worth a special note: “She […]
Via TPM, we read about a reporter (Capital Beat, 10/16/08) who got knocked down at a Sarah Palin rally in North Carolina because he tried to interview an Obama supporter. This seems like the natural progression from the earlier report of Palin inciting her followers to hurl obscenities and racist insults at journalists. And, you […]
First-time film director Michelle Garcia discovers (Women In Media & News, 10/13/08) how sexism affects media images of such underreported issues as the U.S. government “denying passports to Mexican-American–CITIZENS–whose birth were attended to by midwives”: [WIMN editor Jennifer L. Pozner] mentions the images and voices contained in the piece are not often widely seen. After […]
