Media
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FAIR: An ‘Unqualified’ Success at Media Manipulation
After the Wisconsin loss, the Hillary Clinton campaign went into high gear, sending emails out announcing a new strategy of going negative. The next day, CNN (4/6/16) ran a piece by senior Washington correspondent Jeff Zeleny that began, “Hillary Clinton’s campaign is taking new steps to try and disqualify Bernie Sanders in the eyes of… Continue reading
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FAIR: Anonymity in the New York Times: By the Numbers
31 March 2016 — FAIR A new report from FAIR looks at a year’s worth of anonymity in the New York Times, with media critic Reed Richardson taking an in-depth look at how unnamed sources were used in the paper in 2015. His research substantiates that the observation Times public editor Margaret Sullivan made in… Continue reading
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FAIR: Journalism’s Dark Matter
For a profession predicated on demanding transparency and accountability from others, the practice of granting anonymity serves as an inconvenient reminder of journalism’s own messy reality. The implied bargain therein—that the value of the light provided by a source’s information outweighs the cost of casting of a shadow over his or her public identity—trades upon… Continue reading
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'We Have Never Ignored Cuba'
Janine Jackson interviewed Aviva Chomsky about Barack Obama’s trip to Cuba for the March 25, 2016, CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript. Continue reading
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Brussels Bombings Destroy Fiction That All Terrorism Deaths Count as Equal
The lasting impression for US readers is that deaths in Belgium are more newsworthy than an equal number of deaths in Turkey, and that if Belgium is to avoid sinking to the level of “failed nations,” it needs to address the outsiders who are dragging it down to a level unbecoming of its continent, or… Continue reading
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NYT Contributor Has Multiple Motives for Denying Drone Crimes
Hayden’s op-ed in the NYT is long on fictional accounts of ultra-scrupulous drone planners worrying about striking civilians and completely lacking the real-life incidents where the US has mistakenly targeted weddings and deliberately hit funerals. That’s to be expected when you ask someone who has carried out what the United Nations and other international law… Continue reading
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Sanders a Bourgeois Deviationist, Washington Post Declares By Jim Naureckas
Last month, before Sanders nearly tied Hillary Clinton in Iowa and beat her by 22 percentage points in New Hampshire—which clearly has Milbank worried that maybe Democrats are insane enough to nominate a socialist, after all. So now Sanders’ problem isn’t that he’s too radical; it’s that he’s not radical enough. Continue reading
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'If We Don’t Look at the Larger Structural Issues, We Can’t Begin to Solve the Problem'
9 January 2015 — FAIR ‘If We Don’t Look at the Larger Structural Issues, We Can’t Begin to Solve the Problem’ The December 25, 2015, CounterSpin reprised three interviews dealing with the issues highlighted by the Black Lives Matter movement. This is a lightly edited transcript of those interviews. Continue reading
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Best of CounterSpin 2015
1 January 2016 — FAIR Best of CounterSpin 2015 All year long, CounterSpin brings you a look, as we say, behind the headlines of the mainstream news—that’s both to shine a light on aspects of emerging stories that might be marginalized (or off the page entirely) in corporate media, and to remind us to be… Continue reading
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WaPo Tallies Police Killings–but Holds Back Some of the Numbers That Count
It’s hard for me to escape the feeling that the Post story—by Kimberly Kindy and Marc Fisher—was framed by the paper to minimize the project’s remarkable findings. Continue reading
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The Yes Men: Annual Report!
We can’t afford to send you all fruitcakes. But we do have a small gift – a few fun tales from this past year. At the end of this email, we’ll also let you in on a few little secrets about the next one. Continue reading
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Arun Kundnani on Islamophobia & the ‘War on Terror,’ Keane Bhatt on a Tale of Two Elections
This week on CounterSpin: Alleged San Bernardino killers Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik did not pledge allegiance to ISIS on social media, the FBI now says, but no matter: The California killings have already added fuel to an upsurge of Islamophobia in US media and politics that in some ways is worse than that seen… Continue reading
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Jamie Kalven on the Laquan McDonald Cover-Up
The video that belied the official story of the police killing of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald, along with an autopsy that also showed police’s initial story to be false, eventually came to light through the work of journalists—but not mainstream journalists Continue reading
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NYT Rewrites Scalia to Make Him Sound Less Racist
The fact that a Supreme Court justice justifies eliminating affirmative action on the basis of openly racist views ought to be big news. By sugarcoating what Scalia actually said, the New York Times disguises that news–making the ethnic cleansing of America’s top schools a more palatable possibility. Perhaps that shouldn’t make me gasp. Continue reading
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Friedman Goes After Trump: Hey, Massive Bombing Was MY Idea!
Where could Trump have gotten the idea that his “infantile threats of massive bombing” would be taken seriously as foreign policy proposals? Well, as a resident of New York City, maybe he reads the New York Times: There is only Option 2 — bombing Iraq, over and over and over again, until either Saddam says… Continue reading
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We marched for peace – not to ‘bully’ Stella Creasy
Sue Wheat gives the truth behind media reports of an ‘intimidating’ anti-war protest in MP Stella Creasy’s Walthamstow constituency. “I just want to set the record straight for anyone reading or listening to the news about Walthamstow and Stella Creasy, which as far as I can tell is totally untrue.” Continue reading
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In New York Times, Blue Eyes ‘Wince and Cloud’ at the Terror of a ‘Gentle Loner’
30 November 2015 — FAIR In New York Times, Blue Eyes ‘Wince and Cloud’ at the Terror of a ‘Gentle Loner’ Colorado terror suspect Robert Dear, described in New York Times stories as a “gentle loner” and as “imperfect but a good man.” Many were taken aback to read the New York Times‘ summary of… Continue reading
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Death-Squad Organizer Is NYT’s Source on Ben Carson’s Lack of Foreign Policy Smarts
As head of Reagan’s CIA division in Latin America in the 1980s, Clarridge took part in the effort to overthrow Nicaragua’s Sandinista government by illegally supplying funds and arms to the Contras—a right-wing terrorist movement that committed brutal war crimes. Continue reading
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Coverage of Russian Plane Bombing Shows What a Difference an Enemy Makes
FAIR has noted the contrast between US media coverage of Paris and Beirut after the militant ISIS movement claimed responsibility for terror attacks in both cities. It may be even more illuminating to look at media reactions to another ISIS-claimed disaster, the bombing of Metrojet Flight 9268, a Russian tourist plane that went down over… Continue reading
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NYT Continues to Obscure Responsibility in US’s Bombing of Hospital
The New York Times followed up its euphemistic and equivocal coverage (FAIR Blog, 10/5/15) of the US bombing of the Médecins Sans Frontières hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, with an article (10/6/15) that continued to downplay the US’s responsibility for the deaths of 12 hospital staffers and 10 patients. Continue reading
The New Dark Age 