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Doctors, media critics demand broader TV debate on healthcare

Tue, 28 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

FAIR - Jul. 28 (Press Release) - Between noon and 1 pm EST, the national media watch group FAIR and local healthcare advocacy groups will deliver a petition signed by over 12,000 people demanding that the TV networks include the single-payer proposal in their coverage of the national healthcare debate. The petition's signatories include Obama's longtime physician, Dr. David Scheiner; filmmaker Michael Moore; former MSNBC host Phil Donahue; actors Mike Farrell, Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon; and doctors Quentin Young, Stephanie Woolhandler and David Himmelstein of Physicians for a National Health Program. The petition will be presented to a representative of ABC News, which disinvited Dr. Scheiner from its recent forum on healthcare reform, where he'd been planning to ask Obama a question about single-payer.

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The Corporate Media Is Shamelessly Pretending Racism Died When Obama Got Elected

Sat, 28 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0800

FAIR - By Janine Jackson - Feb. 28 (Advocacy) - For those who don’t see racial inequity playing out every day in disparate joblessness, incarceration or mortality rates, the presence of a brown-skinned man in the White House means there’s no more structural work to be done; those struggling from now on have no excuse.

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The Fairness Doctrine

Thu, 19 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0800

FAIR - By Steve Rendall - Feb. 19 (Investigative Report) - A license permits broadcasting, but the licensee has no constitutional right to be the one who holds the license or to monopolize a...frequency to the exclusion of his fellow citizens. There is nothing in the First Amendment which prevents the Government from requiring a licensee to share his frequency with others.... It is the right of the viewers and listeners, not the right of the broadcasters, which is paramount. — U.S. Supreme Court, upholding the constitutionality of the Fairness Doctrine in Red Lion Broadcasting Co. v. FCC, 1969.

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Top Troubling Tropes of Campaign '08

Thu, 23 Oct 2008 00:00:00 -0700

FAIR - Oct. 23 (News Analysis) - Not only do journalists organize the election story around the question--not terribly helpful to voters--of who's up and who's down, they largely base their evaluation of the race on shallow image-based narratives that the media construct themselves: Barack Obama is an "elitist" who might not "get the way we live" (Extra!, 7=8/08), while John McCain is a straight-talking "maverick" (Extra!, 5=6/08). Though these tropes are treated by establishment news outlets as self-evident, they usually fail to stand up to any kind of scrutiny.

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Right-wing Pundits Use Mainstream Media to Smear Muslims

Thu, 09 Oct 2008 00:00:00 -0700

FAIR - Oct. 09 (Press Release) - Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR), the national media watchdog group, released a first-of-its-kind report today profiling 12 of the leading Islamophobic pundits and media figures and examining the ways they’ve negatively influenced media coverage in the U.S. The report, “Smearcasting: How Islamophobes Spread Fear, Bigotry and Misinformation,” describes a loose network of right-wing, anti-Muslim partisans who regularly use innuendo, questionable sources of information and even lies to smear, and effectively marginalize, Muslims in the media.

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The Myth of Pro-Obama Media Bias

Fri, 19 Sep 2008 00:00:00 -0700

FAIR - By John K. Wilson - Sep. 19 (Opinion) - As noted by FAIR's Peter Hart in Extra! (5-6/08) and Eric Alterman and George Zornick in the Nation (7/7/08), it is difficult to find even one subject where the press has truly held McCain's feet to the fire while giving Obama a break from scrutiny. If corporate media are in love with Obama, they sure are picking a funny way of showing it.

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Brokaw Warns Dems to Lay Off McCain

Fri, 29 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0700

FAIR - Aug. 29 (News Analysis) - Longtime NBC anchor Tom Brokaw offered two unusual warnings to Democrats about the supposed limits of criticizing Republican presidential candidate John McCain, suggesting that McCain's military service makes it dangerous for Democrats to aggressively challenge him.

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Media Cheer Biden Choice

Thu, 28 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0700

FAIR - Aug. 28 (News Analysis) - Most of the corporate media cheered Barack Obama's selection of Sen. Joe Biden as his running mate, seeing the move as a signal that their well-circulated criticisms of Obama were on point.

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Georgia/Russia Conflict Forced Into Cold War Frame

Thu, 14 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0700

FAIR - Aug. 14 (Press Release) - Georgia's contribution to the escalation of tensions in the region were not completely ignored by U.S. media, but its aggressive actions were often euphemized, as in AP's reference to "a crackdown by Georgia last week" (8/11/08), and were rarely allowed to interfere with the preferred narrative of Georgia as victim of an expansionist Russia.

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Winter Soldier Blackout

Fri, 30 May 2008 00:00:00 -0700

FAIR - May. 30 (Press Release) - In March, dozens of veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars gathered in Maryland to offer their firsthand accounts of what they had seen--and in some cases done--in both war zones. The dramatic Winter Soldier hearings were well-covered in the alternative and independent media. But the corporate media mostly took a pass (FAIR Action Alert, 3/19/08)--a trend that continued when Winter Soldier came to Capitol Hill.

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A double standard on reporters who express opinions?

Wed, 13 Feb 2008 00:00:00 -0800

FAIR - By Isabel Macdonald - Feb. 13 (Advocacy) - There is no indication that Worthington's reporting was flawed in any way. What the paper is saying is that Worthington's critical view of Guantánamo disqualifies him from having a byline on a Times article on the subject, and must be noted whenever he contributes to such a story. Is this rule applied to all Times reporters covering any subject? It would seem not. The Times' response to its chief military correspondent Michael Gordon expressing a point of view on national TV on the very topic he covers as a reporter provides an instructive comparison.

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Media on Healthcare: Saying what they don't mean

Wed, 06 Feb 2008 00:00:00 -0800

FAIR - By Janine Jackson - Feb. 06 (News Analysis) - Knocking down the straw man that single-payer would solve all healthcare problems isn't much of an achievement; while advocates point out that single-payer systems in other countries cost far less than the U.S.'s profit-dominated healthcare industry, the main benefit they point to of universal health coverage is that it would provide everyone with healthcare.

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Money Is the Real Green Power:

Tue, 05 Feb 2008 00:00:00 -0800

FAIR - By Karl Grossman - Feb. 05 (Special Report) - Nuclear advocates in government and the nuclear industry are engaged in a massive, heavily financed drive to revive atomic power in the United States-with most of the mainstream media either not questioning or actually assisting in the promotion.

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Perilous Journalism in the Persian Gulf

Wed, 16 Jan 2008 00:00:00 -0800

FAIR - Jan. 16 (Press Release) - George W. Bush's goal of elevating the Iran threat (New York Times, 1/8/08) got a major boost last week from the news media, who failed to question the Pentagon's alarmist account of an encounter between U.S. and Iranian boats.

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Humbled in New Hampshire?

Fri, 11 Jan 2008 00:00:00 -0800

FAIR - Jan. 11 (Press Release) - Matthews' response is illuminating. Does a political junkie who hosts two national television programs really not have any idea about how to cover politics other than talking about strategy, fundraising and polls? Do campaign journalists really have so little interest in the actual policy positions of the candidates?

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USA Today Squeezes Edwards Out of Race

Sat, 22 Dec 2007 00:00:00 -0800

FAIR - Dec. 22 (News Analysis) - In a good example of corporate media striving to narrow down the Democratic primary field (FAIR Media Advisory, 5/8/07), USA Today (12/18/07) had a story on candidates' electability that wrote all but two of them out of existence.

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The Media and Class Warfare

Sat, 24 Nov 2007 09:52:24 -0800

FAIR - By Norman Solomon - Nov. 24 (Opinion) - As unions wither, the journalistic establishment has a rationale for giving them less ink and air time. As the media coverage diminishes, fewer Americans find much reason to believe that unions are relevant to their working lives.

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Military Atrocities Less Newsworthy Than Right-Wing Fantasies

Mon, 06 Aug 2007 21:58:51 -0700

FAIR - By (name not given) - Aug. 06 (Press Release) - The Nation's investigation into the U.S. occupation's impact on Iraqi civilians (7/30/07) and a series of columns by a U.S. soldier published in the New Republic (2/5/07, 6/4/07, 7/23/07) have given media access to compelling new documentation of egregious behavior by U.S. troops in Iraq. The New York Times and Washington Post have responded by paying much less attention to the scrupulously documented evidence of these abuses in the Nation and focusing on right-wing bloggers' unsubstantiated criticisms of the New Republic columns.

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Romney's Iraq Gaffe Ignored

Fri, 08 Jun 2007 09:20:01 -0700

FAIR - By (no name provided) - Jun. 08 (Other) - Romney's error was serious--as Begala said on CNN, "If this were a general election debate, [it] would be a disqualifier." But if the press were to admit that rewriting of recent history was cause for alarm, they might have to acknowledge that George W. Bush has done the same thing. On July 14, 2003, Bush declared of Saddam Hussein, "We gave him a chance to allow the inspectors in, and he wouldn't let them in." The comment received little media attention, with the Washington Post (7/15/03) saying only that his assertion "appeared to contradict the events leading up to war this spring." If the current occupant of the White House is given such a pass, perhaps it's no surprise that the same treatment is given to Republican candidates looking to succeed him.

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Treated Like a Democrat

Thu, 31 May 2007 22:51:08 -0700

FAIR - By Fair - May. 31 (Press Release) - With the public still many months away from choosing presidential candidates from either major party, the media have fallen into a familiar pattern of trying to "weed out" candidates that do not meet the press corps' ideological standards (Extra!, 9-10/03). This tendency usually applies more to Democrats than Republicans--but Rep. Ron Paul (R. Texas) has demonstrated that conservative libertarians as well can be deemed too far out for the establishment media.

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ABC (Under)counting Iraqi Dead

Wed, 21 Mar 2007 09:15:38 -0700

FAIR - Mar. 21 (Advocacy) - ABC News is marking the anniversary of the start of the Iraq War this week by reporting on its major survey of Iraqi public opinion. But when it comes to one fundamental tally of the cost of the war--the number of Iraqis who have been killed by the war--top ABC anchors are minimizing the death toll.

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NYT Breaks Own Anonymity Rules

Fri, 16 Feb 2007 16:24:56 -0800

FAIR - By Byron Calame, Public Editor - Feb. 16 (Special Report) - Paper pushes Iran threat with one-sided array of unnamed officials

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