NewsTrust - Most Recent Stories

Iraq All Over Again?

Thu, 08 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

FAIR - By Editors - Oct. 08 (News Analysis) - There have been recent discussions (e.g., New York Times, 9/29/09) about whether the press is doing a better job covering allegations about Iran's nuclear program than they did during the run-up to the Iraq War. But in some crucial and very basic ways, many in the media are performing just as poorly as they did in 2002 and 2003

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For Media, ‘Class War’ Has Wealthy Victims

Thu, 06 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

FAIR - By Radley Glasser, Steve Rendall - Aug. 06 (Investigative Report) - a new FAIR survey shows that within top national media outlets, “class warfare” terminology is almost exclusively employed to characterize as belligerent actions taken on behalf of the non-rich. The result is a biased national discourse that portrays “class war” as an ongoing persecution of the wealthy at the hands of the poor and working class and their populist leaders.

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Single-Payer & Interlocking Directorates

Thu, 06 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

FAIR - By Kate Murphy - Aug. 06 (Investigative Report) - A single-payer plan would allow the delivery of healthcare to remain private, but the government would pay for it out of a single federal health insurance fund. Like Medicare or Canada’s healthcare program, it would cut out the middleman by bypassing private health insurance companies. But such companies are well-represented on the boards of directors of media conglomerates—a factor that may help explain the blackout of such a popular possibility for reform.

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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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Before We 'Save' Journalism

Thu, 23 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

FAIR - By Jim Naureckas - Jul. 23 (Opinion) - One thing to keep in mind while worrying about the future of journalism is that its past hasn’t been all that great either.

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Will Officials Take the Fifth Unless the Daily Show Is Muzzled?

Fri, 19 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700

FAIR - By Jim Naureckas - Jun. 19 (News Analysis) - Do they still teach the First Amendment in law school?

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Single-Payer and False Football Analogies

Fri, 19 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700

FAIR - By Peter Hart - Jun. 19 (News Analysis) - The decision to marginalize single-payer is a decision to avoid playing between the 40-yard lines. The Times and the rest of the corporate media are the ones who have decided that single-payer isn't popular--no matter what their polling tells them.

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WaPo Slams Single-Payer

Tue, 09 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700

FAIR - By Peter Hart - Jun. 09 (News Analysis) - In the strange world of corporate journalism, one can prove his/her "centrist" credentials by opposing a policy that has majority support from the public.

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Hannity Hate Buddy Has 'Bullets to Put Them Down'

Thu, 04 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700

FAIR - By Gabriel Volles - Jun. 04 (News Analysis) - And, the post continued, "If any state attorney, police department or court thinks they're going to get uppity with us about this; I suspect we have enough bullets to put them down too." Directly referring to the reason such hate speech is such a hot topic currently, the Hartford Courant reports that "elsewhere on [Turner's] blog, the recent fatal shooting of a Kansas abortion provider is called 'a righteous act.'"

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U.S. Media Complicit in U.S. Intimidation of Media

Wed, 03 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700

FAIR - By Gabriel Volles - Jun. 03 (News Analysis) - Discussing (5/31/09) the "story on the two U.S. journalists detained in North Korea," NPR Check's Mytwords states clearly that it "deserves coverage, as did some coverage of [Roxana] Saberi's arrest in Iran (though not the wall to wall attention given by NPR)." But a reader's link to the L.A. Times' May 24 "article on another irregular (illegal?) detention of a journalist" sheds light on a glaring double standard:

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PBS Ombud Sides with Frontline Critics

Fri, 10 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Common Dreams - Apr. 10 (Press Release) - PBS ombud Michael Getler is siding with critics of a Frontline documentary that failed to examine single-payer national health insurance as a possible alternative to the U.S. healthcare system.

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NYT: Obama Appoints 'Swahili-Speaking' Envoy to Sudan

Wed, 18 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0700

FAIR - By Julie Hollar - Mar. 18 (News Analysis) - Does Baker or his Times editors realize that they don't speak Swahili in Sudan? It's like reporting that Obama appointed a French-speaking envoy to Germany, and meaning it in a flattering way. Sure, they don't speak French in Germany, but they're both in Europe, right?

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George Will on the Infallibility of Business Journalism

Tue, 17 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0700

FAIR - By Peter Hart - Mar. 17 (News Analysis) - "I think the best journalism in America is business journalism precisely because they deal with real metrics. You can actually--they know things." --George Will, ABC's This Week, 3/15/09 It's possible that Will actually believes this. Read Dean Starkman's piece in Mother Jones, "How Could 9,000 Business Reporters Blow It?," for another take. Or this piece from Extra!. Or recall that, not too long ago, Will was lecturing us on how the economy was doing just fine, in spite of the gloomy message the media was delivering: Conservative pundit George Will (ABC's This Week, 12/4/05) blamed media coverage for the public's failure to understand that "the economy is booming," attributing this misapprehension to "Will's two laws of economic journalism," one of which mandates that "there's no such thing as good news."

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Blog ? Blog Archive ? The Mysterious 'Special Risks' of the Obama Presidency

Mon, 16 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0700

FAIR - By Jim Naureckas - Mar. 16 (News Analysis) - The problem, if I'm reading the article right, isn't that the president is saying anything untrue. Rather, we're dealing with a dynamic in which one president hands off a catastrophe -- several catastrophes, actually -- to a successor, and the successor isn't supposed to talk about it.

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Study: Media Blackout on Single-Payer Healthcare

Fri, 06 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0800

FAIR - Mar. 06 (News Analysis) - Single-payer--a model in which healthcare delivery would remain largely private, but would be paid for by a single federal health insurance fund (much like Medicare provides for seniors, and comparable to Canada's current system)--polls well with the public, who preferred it two-to-one over a privatized system in a recent survey (New York Times/CBS, 1/11-15/09). But a media consumer in the week leading up to the summit was more likely to read about single-payer from the hostile perspective of conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer than see an op-ed by a single-payer advocate in a major U.S. newspaper.

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What the Dow Isn't

Thu, 05 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0800

FAIR - Mar. 05 (News Analysis) - But reporters and commentators are mistaken if they believe the Dow Jones average amounts to a public referendum on the Obama White House (or any other White House, for that matter). There is also little evidence that a rising stock market is necessarily tied to increased prosperity or broad economic health; it is a measure of what people who trade stocks think those stocks are worth, i.e. how much they think other traders would pay for them. As Dean Baker wrote in response to a Washington Post article (3/3/09), the value of the Dow is not a reliable indicator of much of anything: "As should be apparent at this point, the stock market can often be driven by irrational exuberance. Remember, it was almost three times as high in 2009 dollars back in 2000 as it is today. Did that make sense?"

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L.A. Times Editors' Colombia Fantasyland

Thu, 05 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0800

FAIR - By Steve Rendall - Mar. 05 (News Analysis) - The capacity for U.S. editorial writers to twist reality when it comes to "free trade" is astounding. But when "free trade" collides with Colombia policy in the minds of the same editorialists, the potential for illogic becomes truly Orwellian. Take Wednesday's Los Angeles Times editorial ("Obama Should Press for Colombia free-trade pact") pushing for passage of the U.S.-Colombia Free Trade Agreement (FTA). The editors denounce U.S. labor activists as "special interests" who "are holding congressional Democrats hostage on the pact."

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Blog ? Blog Archive ? Palestinians as Alien Creatures

Wed, 04 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0800

FAIR - By Jim Naureckas - Mar. 04 (News Analysis) - Sometimes when you read reports about the Middle East, you get the impression that corporate journalists think Palestinians are another species entirely. Here's the New York Times' Mark Landler (3/4/09) explaining the theory of how better relations with Syria could help create a peace deal between Israel and Palestine: By seeking an understanding with Syria, which has cultivated close ties to Iran, the United States could increase the pressure on Iran to respond to its offer of direct talks. Such an understanding would also give Arab states and moderate Palestinians the political cover to negotiate with Israel. That, in turn, could increase the burden on Hamas, the Islamic militant group that controls Gaza, to relax its hostile stance toward Israel.

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David Gregory Mistakes Dow for Opinion Poll

Tue, 03 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0800

FAIR - By Jim Naureckas - Mar. 03 (News Analysis) - The Dow is not a measure about what "people" think about government policies. It's a measure of what the tiny, elite group of people who trade stocks think stocks are worth, which is to say what they think other people would pay for them. These evaluations have little to do with the long-term health of the economy. In some cases, a declining stock market might be good news for the economy, particularly if stock prices have been unrealistically inflated.

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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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Does the Post Fact-Check George Will?

Wed, 18 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0800

FAIR - Feb. 18 (News Analysis) - Washington Post columnist George Will is among the most widely syndicated in the newspaper business--which means that his recent error-filled column about climate change will misinform the readers of hundreds of papers across the country. Will made several specious claims in his February 15 column in an attempt to argue that climate change is not a serious concern. (Will has a history of such denial--see Extra!, 5-6/07.) He started by citing newsmagazine stories from the 1970s that warned of global cooling. The prevailing scientific consensus at that time did not support such claims (Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, 9/08), but Will likes to pretend that it did--calling it another example of "predicted planetary calamities that did not happen"--in order to bolster the idea that scientists can be wildly off-base. (Will had actually been sent a copy of the BAMS piece by one of the authors after he made a similar false claim last year--Washington Post, 5/22/08. The author reports he "got a nice note back from him thanking me for sharing it"--ABQJournal.com, 2/15/09.)

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CNN's Lou Dobbs Peddles Lies and Anti-Union Propaganda

Tue, 10 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0800

AlterNet - Feb. 10 (News Analysis) - Under EFCA, workers would still have the right to vote in a National Labor Review Board (NLRB) "secret ballot" election if 30 percent of the workforce signs cards, just as they do now. EFCA would change the process of union formation by giving workers seeking to join a union an additional option of winning union representation after a majority of the workforce signs cards, through a new provision to the act (section 9 c 6).

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Bipartisanship=Shifting Right?

Tue, 03 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0800

FAIR - Feb. 03 (News Analysis) - Given the concessions made to Republican critics, as well as the high-profile meetings Obama conducted with top Republicans, it's curious that the failure would be portrayed as Obama's. As Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne put it (2/2/09), "What should have been hailed as an administration victory was cast in large parts of the media as a kind of defeat: Obama had placed a heavy emphasis on bipartisanship, and he failed to achieve it."

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Busted Bubble

Fri, 05 Dec 2008 00:00:00 -0800

FAIR - By Veronica Cassidy - Dec. 05 (News Analysis) - Over the summer, the country's two mortgage giants, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, collapsed, marking the definitive bursting of the housing bubble that began in the mid-1990s. Although it was the second major economic bubble in less than a decade, most in corporate media ignored the warning signs. Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic Policy and Research (CEPR) and author of the American Prospect blog Beat the Press, told Extra!: "It continues to be this sort of bad-event story," with corporate media and the select group of economists on whom they rely acting as though "a hurricane came and wiped out Fannie and Freddie." But journalists shouldn't have been so surprised. As early as 2002, Baker, along with other economic experts like Robert Shiller, Edward Leamer and Doug Henwood, and a network of blogs such as Housing Bubble Blog, warned that soaring housing prices represented a speculative bubble—one that was bound to pop. Immediately following the collapse of the stock market bubble, Baker became concerned about the remarkable growth in the value of housing nationwide (Economic Reporting Review, 4/8/02). Normally, increases in the price of real estate are in line with the rate of inflation (CEPR, 8/13/03; Irrational Exuberance, Robert Shiller, 2005), but as Baker pointed out in 2003 (L.A. Times, 12/18/03), housing prices had outpaced inflation by some 35 percentage points since 1995. Yet there had been no significant population boom or increase in wages on the demand side, and no shortage of housing on the supply side, to explain this trend. "The bubble will eventually burst," he warned, "leading to another recession and destroying the main source of savings for tens of millions of families."

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