FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
“Black women work harder than any other group in our society, and this is consistently true. You just have to look at the damn numbers, and a lot of people in mainstream politics are just not interested in doing that.”
The New York Times has a fairy tale it wants to tell you—about the magical land of Centrism and how it needs to be saved from the sinister Lefties….
If the Times is going to treat Bill Clinton’s record of marital infidelity as relevant to the contest between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, why doesn’t it treat Trump’s record of infidelity as relevant?
“Our society is generating poverty and inequality, and generating it way more for low-income women of color than it is for anybody else.”
A New York Times op-ed claims that “no one doubted” that Bill Clinton “had given new life” to the Democratic Party. Actually, plenty of people have doubted this. But since corporate media keep pushing the fantasy of Bill Clinton as savior of the Democratic Party, it’s worth going over the reality once again.
While the advocates of a policy certainly have the right to assign whatever name they like to the policy, it seems a bit extreme to criticize its opponents for using the term that advocates themselves had used in the recent past.
“Have Democrats Pulled Too Far Left?” asks a New York Times op-ed. This question is always answered affirmatively by corporate media, but the column still manages to surprise with its degree of intellectual dishonesty.
NBC Meet the Press taps Bill Clinton to talk Iraq. But will viewers know that Clinton was also a crucial supporter of the invasion?
National Journal reporter James Oliphant has discovered that the Obama White House has a very powerful weapon it can deploy against its critics: bloggers.
Big efforts are underway to burnish Bill Clinton’s economic legacy. The New York Times does its part by failing to quote critics of Clinton’s record.
There are perhaps plenty of lessons in the (most recent) Senate failure to pass even modest new restrictions/regulations on gun ownership. But one lesson needs to be resisted: The idea that passing a more expansive gun control law in 1994 came back to bite Democrats in the midterm elections.
One of the problems with media “factchecking” is the notion that all things must be “checked” equally. If you factcheck a Republican and find three whoppers, your fact check of a Democrat better work real hard to find a comparable level of spin or dishonesty. Which is exactly how Associated Press reporters Matt Apuzzo and […]
A few weeks ago Newsweek got a lot of attention for Niall Ferguson’s factually challenged cover story slamming the Obama case for re-election. This week, in true corporate media style, we get the “other” side: An argument that Obama should move the Democratic party to the right. Peter Boyer’s piece, “Why Barack Needs Bill,” recycles […]
Most people think rich people should pay more in taxes. And they think the government should spend more to help revive the economy. The New York Times knows this—but still calls this discussion “politically sensitive.” Today Jonathan Weisman has a piece (6/7/12) about recent comments by Bill Clinton and former Clinton/Obama economic adviser Larry Summers. The […]
In corporate media, some political arguments are treated as indisputable fact. One of the most important: Democrats win by moving to the right. In the New York Times (5/3/12), Peter Baker offers the latest example: Mr. Obama, who campaigned on Sunday with Mr. Clinton, seems to be following his Democratic predecessor’s playbook. After a generation […]
A New York Times profile (1/8/11) of author/economist Robert Reich was headlined “Obama the Centrist Irks a Liberal Lion.” It’s hard not to see where reporter Michael Powell comes down in the debate over Democrats moving to the right: Mr. Reich sees a parallel with his former boss, Mr. Clinton, and draws no comfort from […]
In the wake of the 2010 midterm elections, one of the more popular suggestions in the corporate media was that Barack Obama take a page from the Bill Clinton playbook and move to the right (Extra!, 12/10). But this narrative mistakes the problems of the current White House, and misremembers the history of Clintonian centrism. […]
One of the more annoying corporate media storylines since the midterms dwells on whether or not Barack Obama will move to the “center” in order to have better luck in the 2012 elections. The conventional wisdom is that Bill Clinton did this after terrible losses in the 1994 midterms, and his “triangulation” proved once […]
In his New York Times column today (7/19/10), Paul Krugman offers a prediction about the likely pundit response to the drubbing Democrats are expected to take in the November elections: What I expect…if and when the midterms go badly, is that the usual suspects will say that it was because Mr. Obama was too liberal—when […]
The dominant story from Hillary Clinton’s trip to Africa was not her comments about combating rape and sexual violence in Congo. No, the top story was Clinton’s testy response to a question about what her husband thought of Chinese business interests in Kenya Congo. That exchange prompted a whole story in today’s New York Times […]
