Media
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‘The Internet Should Be Treated as a Public Utility’
Janine Jackson: If it weren’t for an open internet, how much do you think you’d know about Black Lives Matter, or NoDAPL? If it were up to private corporations to determine which websites you can access and which you can’t—based on which ones pay them—what are the odds that you’d be able to keep up… Continue reading
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Media: Declining to Label Lies, NPR Picks Diplomacy Over Reality
NPR is notorious for bending over backwards to avoid the appearance of a liberal bias, even refusing to carry an opera program in 2011 after its host participated in an Occupy protest. But, in the age of Trump and his unprecedentedly loose relationship with reality, the network’s strict adherence to “both sides” journalism does a… Continue reading
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Media: 100 Days of Media Hoping for a New, Improved Trump
Nearly 100 days into the Trump presidency, corporate media are still struggling to reckon with the man that occupies the White House. An administration so proudly reckless in its actions and so brazenly detached from the truth has routinely overwhelmed political reporters whose accountability muscles have atrophied. And from cable news panels to newspaper op-ed… Continue reading
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David Ignatius’ 15 Years of Running Spin for Saudi Regime
Last week, in “A Young Prince Is Reimagining Saudi Arabia. Can He Make His Vision Come True?,” Washington Post foreign affairs columnist David Ignatius (4/20/17) wrote what read like a press release for the Saudi regime. What’s more, he’s written the same article several times before. For almost 15 years, Ignatius has been breathlessly updating… Continue reading
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Media: At Reuters, ‘Not Refuting’ Is the Same as ‘Seeing’
“I am not refuting that”? How does that translate into “General…Sees Russia Sending Weapons to Taliban”? If NASA tells Reuters that they can’t refute speculation that there might be life on Mars, will Reuters run a story headlined “NASA Sees Life on Mars”? That would be a scoop! Continue reading
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Media: NYT’s ‘Impossible to Verify’ North Korea Nuke Claim Spreads Unchecked by Media
Buoyed by a total of 18 speculative verb forms—five “mays,” eight “woulds” and five “coulds”—New York Times reporters David E. Sanger and William J. Broad (4/24/17) painted a dire picture of a Trump administration forced to react to the growing and impending doom of North Korea nuclear weapons. Continue reading
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At NYT, Climate Denial and Racism Don’t Make You Fringe–but Single-Payer Does
Being in the New York Times is a legitimizing event, one that cements ideas as not fringe, “other,” or in the realm of the dreaded, career-ending “conspiracy theory.” So it understandably upset many liberals when the Times decided to bestow upon hard-right Wall Street Journal deputy editorial page editor Bret Stephens the ultimate stamp of… Continue reading
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Media: Thomas Friedman’s Perverse Love Affair With ISIS
For the second time in as many years, Thomas Friedman has explicitly advocated that the United States use the so-called Islamic State in Iraq and Syria as a proxy force against Syria, Russia, Iran and Hezbollah. The New York Times foreign affairs columnist made this suggestion in his Wednesday column, “Why Is Trump Fighting ISIS… Continue reading
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Media: Out of 46 Major Editorials on Trump’s Syria Strikes, Only One Opposed
Of the top 100 US newspapers, 47 ran editorials on President Donald Trump’s Syria airstrikes last week: 39 in favor, seven ambiguous and only one opposed to the military attack. In other words, 83 percent of editorials on the Syria attack supported Trump’s bombing, 15 percent took an ambivalent position and 2 percent said the… Continue reading
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North Korea: ‘The Only Sensible Path at This Point is Dialogue’
Janine Jackson: The Washington Post suggests that people in Seattle and San Francisco “should be worried” about being hit by a ballistic missile from North Korea, citing an analyst who described such an event, a bit cryptically, as “a looming threat but not a current threat.” If the concern is that the saber-rattling between Kim… Continue reading
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The Essential Pundit Take: ‘Trump Became President’ by Bombing Syria
8 April 2017 — FAIR Fareed Zakaria: Presidents “don’t need to go to a pesky Congress every time they want military force.” “I think Donald Trump became president of the United States” last night, CNN host Fareed Zakaria said when asked about the significance of Trump’s airstrikes on Syria (New Day, 4/7/17). “I think this Continue reading
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Bloomberg’s Hit Job on Venezuela – and Me By Michael Hudson
I just had a disastrous and embarrassing interaction with Bloomberg, and feel that I was ambushed and sandbagged by having my comments taken out of context in a hit piece Bloomberg’s journalists wrote on Venezuela – evidently trying to distort my own views in a two-for-one job. Continue reading
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Conspiracy Theorists Welcome in Corporate Media–if They Have the Right Targets
Former British Conservative MP Louise Mensch has become something of a celebrity of late in anti-Trump media. In the past two weeks, Mensch has been touted by former head of the Democratic National Committee Donna Brazile and prominent Harvard Law Professor Laurence Tribe, and appeared on MSNBC (3/11/17), the New York Times op-ed page (3/17/17)… Continue reading
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Media: NYT Says Congress Has 'Duty' to Make War–Rather Than the Right to Reject It
As reports come in detailing the degree to which Donald Trump has escalated the “War on ISIS”—and killed hundreds more civilians in the process—this would seem like a good time for the country to sit back and examine the United States’ approach to fighting “terrorism” and its recent iteration, the so-called Islamic State. Continue reading
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Right-Wing Foundation, Scary Nuke Maps Drive Narrative on North Korea ‘Threat’
Tensions between the United States and North Korea are making their way back into the news after a series of missile tests and presidential Twitter threats. Meanwhile, a conservative think tank—previously thought all but dead—has seen a resurgence in relevancy, thanks to its alignment with Donald Trump. The result is that the Heritage Foundation has… Continue reading
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Pie in the Sky?
This is huge. You – along with thousands of other people – have helped throw a major spanner into Rupert Murdoch’s plans to take full control of Sky. Karen Bradley, the Culture Secretary, just announced an investigation into the takeover. Continue reading
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Media Fawn Over Trump’s Success at Saying Words in Semi-Coherent Fashion
What came to be known as the “expectations game” during the George W. Bush years was wielded with notorious cynicism. The assumption behind this game in those days was that Bush was a bumbling doofus who could hardly string together a coherent sentence, so if he got to the level of a high school debate,… Continue reading
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Shotgun Pointed at Black Children Trivialized as ‘Confederate Flag Incident’
1 March 2017 — FAIR With a loaded shotgun, actually. As FAIR has noted before (4/1/15, 3/8/16), how a story is framed is as important—if not more so—than the content of an article. Sixty percent of Americans don’t read past the headline and 60 percent of Americans share articles on social media without reading them. Continue reading
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Media: Downplaying US Contribution to Potential Yemen Famine
For almost two years, the United States has backed—with weapons, logistics and political support—a Saudi-led war in Yemen that has left over 10,000 dead, 40,000 wounded, 2.5 million internally displaced, 2.2 million children suffering from malnutrition and over 90 percent of civilians in need of humanitarian aid. Continue reading
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‘Ajit Pai Wants to Shut Down the Way We Communicate and Organize’
Regulators who don’t much believe in regulation are looking like a hallmark of the Trump administration. What does that mean for the access to communication and information that’s critical to our daily lives? The newly appointed chair of the Federal Communications Commission, Ajit Pai, doesn’t want to actually eliminate the agency, as far as we… Continue reading
The New Dark Age 