FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
Economist Dean Baker takes issue (Beat the Press, 10/16/08) with the moment in Thursday’s presidential debate in which Senator McCain blamed the housing market meltdown on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac‘s lending practices. While Fannie and Freddie, as huge actors in the mortgage market, certainly contributed to the bubble, it is absurd to point to […]
Proclaiming that, when moderating the last U.S. presidential debate, CBS‘s “Bob Schieffer lived up to his reputation,” activist David Swanson (Media With Conscience, 10/15/08) says “this debate was another awful one, and intentionally so. Dumb questions on dumb topics.” Some of Swanson’s blow by blow: Bob Schieffer demands that both candidates commit to cutting programs. […]
Billing the current debates as “a political sham,” David Rosen describes (Eureka Street, 10/08/08) how the media blockbusters–the first debates’ audience was “more than the number of Americans who watched the opening night of the Beijing Olympics”–“not only exclude legitimate third-party candidates, but are structured in a way to inhibit meaningful engagement between the candidates […]
You don’t generally expect to see a member of a terrorist movement portrayed sympathetically in the pages of a major U.S. newspaper, but that’s what the Washington Post gave us this week (10/15/08) in a report from the West Bank by Linda Gradstein: Avi Ben Yakov is a soft-spoken Jewish settler who loves playing with […]
A rare story in the New York Times about an independent presidential candidate finds several hundred attendees at a Ralph Nader rally on Wall Street, which leads the Times to write: In the $700 billion bailout plan for the financial system, Mr. Nader, now on his fourth presidential run, has finally found a real-life event […]
Time magazine columnist Joe Klein– in a column that generally tilts in Obama’s favor– starts off with a rather curious observation about healthcare policy (see bold): This really gets down to the fundamental difference in our philosophies,” John McCain said, quite accurately, in the heat of the third presidential debate. “If you notice … Senator […]
The Resisting Empire speaking tour keeps on rolling (Fall/08), with a decidedly non-corporate mission: Here and around the world, people want to see an end to the Iraq War and a change in the reckless direction of U.S. foreign policy. U.S. aggression has inflicted a humanitarian catastrophe–from Iraq to Afghanistan and beyond–with millions of people […]
The American News Project (10/16/08) bucks corporate journalists’ obsession with largely substanceless campaign politics by filming “people outside of the media spotlight, people hit hard by our nation’s crises at home and abroad”: For the third and final presidential debate, a horde of journalists and pundits… descend… on Hempstead, New York, and focus their attention […]
Civil liberties advocate Leslie Harris Huffington Post confesses (10/9/08) that “sometimes I just want to grab our government leaders by their collective collar and yell: ‘What part of “free” in “free speech” don’t you understand?!’” Instead she settles for the next best thing and suggests some guidelines for the next U.S. president on “the issue […]
Fed up with corporate media neglect–and even abuse–of such issues, the New Routes to Community Health program has announced (Business Wire, 9/30/08) a “new model for improving the health of immigrants in the United States using media created by immigrants”: Eight diverse immigrant-led collaborations across the United States each are receiving $225,000 over three years […]
Over at Media Matters’ County Fair blog, they’ve updated their tally of ACORN mentions on cable news: *Number of times CNN has mentioned ACORN since Friday: 67 *Number of times Fox News has mentioned Joe Biden since Friday: 130 *Number of times Fox News has mentioned Sarah Palin since Friday: 541 *Number of times Fox […]
USA Today weighs in on the ACORN “vote fraud” controversy with a story headlined “Campaigns Take Aim as New Vote Fraud Allegations Emerge.” The story’s lead suggests a typically bad rendition of the media’s usual “false balance” routine, reporting that the McCain and Obama campaigns are “trading accusations of voter fraud and voter suppression and […]
FAIR associate Norman Solomon pens (Columbus Free Press, 10/13/08) a “Requiem for the Bailout Storyline”: More recent events should not be allowed to obscure the reality that the news media played a pivotal role in stampeding the country into a bailout that was unwise and unjust….
Catching more media dissembling on behalf of U.S. government torture policies, the Daily Beast‘s Scott Horton lets readers know (10/10/08) that on Thursday evening WNET in New York will air an important new documentary by Emmy and Dupont Award winning producer Sherry Jones entitled Torturing Democracy. It appears on WNET and several other affiliates independently […]
Andrew Burmon of Salon reports on corporate media-facilitated “voter fraud hysteria” like the New York Post‘s Ken Blackwell op-ed–“yes, the former Ohio secretary of state of 2004 election infamy–warn[ing of] radical groups sending the nation into a protracted legal battle even worse than the mess back in 2000.” Burmon features (10/15/08, ad-viewing required) Barnard College […]
Just in time for Bob Schieffer’s hosting of the final 2008 U.S. presidential debate, Brad Jacobson has republished (10/15/08) his May 6 MediaBloodhound blog post critiquing Schieffer’s Bush administration record, “which has treaded between muted criticism and outright fawning”: Throughout his January 2006 interview with Bush, Schieffer responded “Um-hmm” and “Okay” and jarringly changed topics […]
Under the headline “Big Media. Bad Idea,” Sophia Banay argues (Portfolio, 10/15/08) that–for anyone “not named Murdoch or Redstone–big media just isn’t working.” Banay uses the language heeded by her audience when writing that you can “say what you want about the benefits of synergies and size for big media companies; for their shareholders, the […]
Writing of FAIR’s new Smearcasters report on the Washington City Paper‘s website (10/13/08), Bobby Allyn finds that “searching U.S. newspapers on Lexis Nexis for ‘Obama,’ ‘Muslim’ and ‘smear’ generates 509 unique hits.” Allyn continues: There have been plenty of reports debunking the Obama Muslim allegation, but not enough about the racial subtext of “smearing” a […]
Hosting David Frum of the National Review on MSNBC‘s Rachel Maddow Show (10/13/08), Maddow responds to the “axis of evil” inventor’s complaint of “an intensification of some of the ugliness of tone that has been a feature of American politics”: I wonder if part of the problem, in the way that we haven’t moved through […]
Expanding on her blog post of October 8, FAIR Communications Director Isabel Macdonald details (Common Dreams, 10/13/08) “one small glitch” in “the Obsession campaign‘s marketing plan [that] has been quite slick”: The public doesn’t seem to be buying it. Newspapers that carried the DVD have faced floods of complaints from readers, and the past week […]
