The new episode of FAIR TV is here! CBS tells us what CEOs think about the "fiscal cliff" and the New York Times counts drone victims– but not very many of them. And did the Associated Press fall for a hoax with their latest "exclusive" on Iran and nuclear weapons? Check it out– and share it with your friends on Facebook and Twitter:
Nov
30
2012
NYT Undercounts Drone Deaths in Pakistan
By 15 Comments
The New York Times editorial page (11/30/12) weighs in on the Obama administration's drone policies. What the paper wants is more accountability: The government "must stay within formal guidelines based on the rule of law." That's all well and good–but the paper should do a better job of counting the innocents killed by drone attacks. The Times explains that aspect of the story this way: For eight years, the United States has conducted but never formally acknowledged a program to kill terrorists associated with Al-Qaeda and the Taliban away from the battlefield in Afghanistan. Using drones, the Central Intelligence Agency [...]
Nov
19
2012
The People Have Spoken: Benghazi, Not Afghanistan
By 19 Comments
At the end of ABC's This Week (11/18/12), Martha Raddatz presented a brief viewer-mail segment: And finally, "Your Voice This Week." Today's question comes from Cheryl Robinson, who writes, "What happened in Benghazi was terribly tragic, and now we're hearing of another Middle Eastern war on the brick. Let us and you, the media, not forget about the war that our own kids are fighting for us in Afghanistan. Why is there so little coverage?" Well, because, unfortunately, very few people feel the way you do, Cheryl. There is a war-weariness with the public, and outside of campaign season, the [...]
Nov
14
2012
Collateral Damage–Not the Usual Kind
By 11 Comments
It's bad enough when media refer to civilian deaths in U.S. wars as "collateral damage," but it was jarring to see how the phrase was used in a Washington Post headline today: Obviously, they're talking about the sex-and-emails scandal. How could dead Afghan civilians ever threaten the career of a high-ranking U.S. official?
Nov
14
2012
Friedman Asks: Why Did Iraq Do That to George W. Bush?
By 1 Comment
Some days it's not easy to make it through a Tom Friedman column. Take today (11/14/12), for instance. I got all the way to the second sentence: Virtually every American president since Dwight Eisenhower has had a Middle Eastern country that brought him grief. In case you're wondering, he really means every president: For George W. Bush, it was Iraq and Afghanistan. Yes, why did those countries give the man so much trouble? For anyone trying to make it all the way through the column, I recommend letting Matt Taibbi walk you through the loopy Friedmanesque metaphors: Iraq is a [...]
Nov
13
2012
Corporate Media Lose Their Favorite 'Warrior Scholar'
By 31 Comments
There's no doubt that the sex scandal that prompted CIA director David Petraeus's sudden resignation late last week is a big story. New details–verified or not–seem to arrive almost by the hour. But the reason it seems to have shaken so many media figures is because Petraeus was uniquely beloved by many in the corporate media, who considered him both an accessible source and a war hero. NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams called him (11/9/12) a "a man of such sterling reputation," and confided on the air to one guest that "it is impossible to be a member of [...]
Oct
02
2012
How to Tell When 'Humans' Die in a U.S. War
By 12 Comments
ABC World News' David Muir (9/30/12) took note of the 2,000th U.S. military death in Afghanistan this way: Overseas now to Afghanistan, and a stark reminder tonight of the human cost of war. An attack at a checkpoint left two Americans dead, one of them a serviceman, the 2,000th U.S. military death since the war began. That kind of language is revealing in that it presents American deaths as evidence of the "human cost of war." But, of course, that is a human cost almost every day most wars. What they're saying is this is primarily something we should think [...]
Sep
21
2012
Is the Afghan Surge Really Over?
By 15 Comments
Misleading media reports today are announcing the end of the U.S. troop surge in Afghanistan. USA Today: And the Washington Post: There are many more along the same lines. It's important to understand that the troop reductions are only part of the total troop surge that happened under Obama. As FAIR noted last year (Media Advisory, 6/23/11) there were two major increases in the number of U.S. troops in 2009: When Obama took office in 2009, the U.S. had about 34,000 troops in Afghanistan. Obama has initiated two major troop increases in Afghanistan: about 20,000 [...]
Sep
17
2012
After NATO Strike Kills 8 Afghan Women, Pundits Still Wonder: Why Do They Hate Us?
By 21 Comments
The protests and violence in Egypt, Libya and Yemen have caused a notable uptick in media discussions about, as Newsweek's cover puts it, "Muslim Rage." Part of the corporate media's job is to make sure real political grievances are mostly kept out of the discussion. It's a lot easier to talk about angry mobs and their peculiar religion than it is to acknowledge that maybe some of the anger has little to do with religion at all. Take the news out of Afghanistan yesterday: A NATO airstrike killed eight women in the eastern province of Laghman who were out collecting [...]
Sep
06
2012
NYT Still Has a Torture Problem
By 21 Comments
What do you call it when prisoners are slammed into walls, forced to wear diapers, placed in stress positions and subjected to drowning? You call that torture–unless you're the New York Times, and the United States is accused of being the torturers. A new report from Human Rights Watch indicates the group has found another victim of CIA waterboarding. This is especially significant because the Agency has long claimed that they had only tortured three people this way. The Human Rights Watch investigation was reported in the New York Times (9/6/12) by Charlie Savage and Scott Shane. But their report [...]
Jun
18
2012
Pakistan's Weird Media
By 8 Comments
Pakistan has seen a television revolution over the past decade or so, opening up the political dialogue and in some cases giving voice to pro-democracy demonstrators. But there's been a downside, as the New York Times noted: But the television revolution has also, in some respects, been bad news for Pakistan. Some shows have given an unchallenged platform to extremists like Hafiz Muhammad Saeed, the founder of the militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba, for whom the United States has offered a $10 million bounty. Conservative clerics have used the airwaves to reinforce prejudice and even urge violence against minorities. Editorial independence is [...]
Jun
07
2012
NATO's Afghan Airstrike Reported…Sort Of
By 15 Comments
Yesterday reports emerged about a NATO airstrike in Logar province that, according to local officials, killed 18 civilians—the vast majority women and children. Readers of the Washington Post could learn about this (6/7/12) by flipping to page 10 and looking for this headline: Afghanistan Suicide Blasts Kill at Least 22 Civilians A suicide attack gets top billing. Next comes word that "overall levels of violence have dropped" in the country. Following that, a helicopter crash that killed two NATO troops. Then finally: Separately, there were conflicting accounts about the killing of civilians in a NATO-led airstrike overnight in Logar province, [...]
Jun
06
2012
NYT: Drone Strikes 'Combat Militancy' by Increasing Militants
By 10 Comments
In today's New York Times article (6/6/12) about the apparent drone killing of Al-Qaeda "deputy leader" Abu Yahya al-Libi, Declan Walsh and Eric Schmitt write: If his death is borne out this time, it would be a milestone in a covert eight-year airstrike campaign that has infuriated Pakistani officials but that has remained one of the United States' most effective tools in combating militancy. That's revealing. It's inarguable that the drones kill people the U.S. government wants to kill, and some it doesn't intend to kill. But does this really qualify as "combating militancy"? In Yemen, the increase in drone [...]
