"Beat sweetener" was written all over John Broder's April 30 New York Times profile of new Interior Secretary Sally Jewell, "a woman of untamed energy, competitiveness and confidence in the boardroom and on a mountain trail."
Apr
26
2013
Texas Fertilizer Plant Disaster: Little Coverage, Much of It Wrong
By 16 Comments
The West Fertilizer Co. explosion last week was largely obscured by blanket coverage of the Boston Marathon bombing. More than that, says legendary EPA whistleblower Hugh Kaufman, a guest on this week's CounterSpin, what coverage there was often obscured the real story.
Apr
22
2013
Don't Quote Me by Name, But My Friends the Koch Brothers Respect the Hell Out of Press Freedom
By 13 Comments
The New York Times finds anonymous sources to assure us that the Koch brothers are not trying to buy the Tribune newspapers in order to "destroy the other side." But Mother Jones finds an actual person who explains how the Kochs actually treat media outlets whose reporting they don't like.
Apr
03
2013
Keystone Polling and an Oil Spill Time Machine
By 6 Comments
Reporting positive polling for the Keystone XL pipeline, USA Today reports, "The numbers come amid continuing efforts to clean up a major new oil spill in Arkansas." But "come amid" is another way of saying "entirely unrelated to."
Mar
28
2013
For NPR, Fracking Fight Is Between Farmers & Movie Stars
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Who stands between the hard-working people of Upstate New York and money and jobs coming out of the ground? Why, it’s actor Mark Ruffalo.
Mar
08
2013
FAIR TV: Hugo Chavez in U.S. Media, Time's Path to Iran War, Keystone XL and the TV Left
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This week on FAIR TV: Hugo Chavez was loathed by the U.S. press–and that didn't change when they reported his death. Plus Time magazine provides a look at the "Path to War" with Iran–omitting a key fact along the way.
And the Keystone XL pipeline is back in the news. But when it came up on ABC's This Week, "left" pundit James Carville had a curious message.
Mar
06
2013
AP: Chavez Wasted His Money on Healthcare When He Could Have Built Gigantic Skyscrapers
By 149 Comments
Chavez squandered his nation's oil money on healthcare, education and nutrition when he could have been building the world's tallest building or his own branch of the Louvre. What kind of monster has priorities like that?
Mar
04
2013
Keystone's Endorsement by a TV 'Leftist'
By 10 Comments
The controversy over the Keystone XL pipeline doesn't get covered much in corporate television–it takes tens of thousands of activists marching in Washington to get a few words on the nightly newscasts. But the State Department's recent draft assessment of the pipeline's environmental impact got a mention on one show, and it said a lot. Not about the pipeline, really, but about corporate media. The comment came on the roundtable discussion on ABC's This Week (3/3/13). The panel, like so many of these discussions, was tilted to the right: A Republican mayor from Utah (Mia Love), a former Bush adviser [...]
Feb
25
2013
Hugo Chavez Keeps Showering the Poor
By 42 Comments
The Chavez years, as best we can tell, have been enormously beneficial to the Venezuelan public as owners of public resources. But when corporate media write about Chavez's policies, they can barely disguise their real feelings–as if the natural order of things would mean that private companies managed the oil industry and captured the profits.
Feb
20
2013
Why Does a Climatologist Need to Explain Economics to Joe Nocera?
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NASA climatologist James Hansen has tried to explain to New York Times columnist Joe Nocera why he's so wrong about the tar sands, but Nocera's account of their argument makes it seem like explaining anything to him would be an uphill battle.
Feb
19
2013
Friendly Oil–Not the Venezuelan Kind
By 22 Comments
With the Keystone climate protests in Washington bringing climate change back into the media, we're hearing a lot about how the Keystone pipeline will, at the very least, mean that we'll be getting our oil from a nice country.
Feb
11
2013
A Beltway Villager's Bad Advice for Obama
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The Washington Post's Chris Cillizza wrote a piece giving Barack Obama some advice on what to say in his State of the Union address. The article almost reads like a parody of Beltway punditry.
