Daniel Hernandez wrote an article for Extra! last year (6/09) about the tendency of U.S. corporate media to treat Mexican violence as a phenomenon that threatens to "spill over" into the U.S.–as in New York Times headlines like "Drug Cartel Violence Spills Over From Mexico, Alarming U.S." (3/23/09) and "Wave of Drug Violence Is Creeping Into Arizona From Mexico, Officials Say" (2/24/09). Hernandez's article, "Does Violence 'Spill Over' or Come Home to Roost?," questioned this framing of the story: It is a treatment of Mexico's crisis as something foreign, unknown and dangerous, as opposed to a threat affecting an intimately [...]
Sep
03
2010
NYT Gender Bias–in Book Reviews and Beyond
By 6 Comments
A recent FAIR study (Extra!, 8/10) looked at politically themed books reviewed by the New York Times Book Review and the C-SPAN show After Words and concluded that both outlets heavily favored white male authors and reviewers. The Times came off particularly badly in the study, which revealed 95 percent of the U.S. authors reviewed, and 96 percent of the reviewers, were white. As far as gender was concerned, women–who obviously make up roughly 50 percent of the population–accounted for just 13 percent of the authors and 12 percent of the critics. Today, Slate weighed in on the New York [...]
Aug
31
2010
The Katrina Story You Don't See So Much in Anniversary Coverage
In the coverage of Hurricane Katrina's fifth anniversary, you'll find several obligatory mentions in the corporate media of the still-decimated Lower Ninth Ward, but you'd be hard pressed to find anything as direct or damning as what you find in independent media coverage–for example, this piece on Women's eNews (8/29/10) by Kimberly Seals Allers, who recently attended a conference in New Orleans on health disparities in communities of color: When a few of the local community leaders came to address us, what they had to say about the Lower Ninth Ward was appalling but not surprising. They said that of [...]
Jul
16
2010
Burqa Ban: Coverage of a Law to 'Free' Women Leaves Them Voiceless
By 39 Comments
As France's lower house of parliament approved a ban on wearing full-face Islamic veils such as the burqa or niqab, many U.S. news outlets left out a key voice in their reports: the Muslim women in France who are actually affected by the ban. Several major outlets, including the New York Times (7/14/10), Washington Post (7/14/10) and the Los Angeles Times (7/14/10), have managed to cover the story without seeking commentary from a single Muslim woman. Out of 11 named sources used bythese newspapers in their July 14 reports, only two were Muslim–both men, one a rector and one leader [...]
Jul
15
2010
Erickson Didn't Invent Anti-White Rhetoric–But He Is Exploiting It
By 8 Comments
I think Jim Naureckas' Erick Erickson/David Duke equation (FAIR Blog, 7/14/10) is overdrawn. Erickson was playing off remarks by King Samir Shabazz, the New Black Panther Party (NBPP) member who stood in front of the largely African-American polling place in Philadelphia with a night stick in his hand. Shabazz is on record in another context saying that black men should kill white people, including children: "You want freedom, you're going to have to kill some crackers. You're going to have to kill their babies." So Erickson is not, as Jim says, "hallucinating" this kind of language–just exploiting it. Erickson and [...]
Jul
14
2010
Erick Erickson = David Duke
By 2 Comments
When he got a gig doing political commentary for CNN, hate-blogger Erick Erickson assured Howard Kurtz that he had realized that "I had to grow up in how I write." And Erickson convinced the New York Times that he had become a kinder, gentler pundit. But hating is what Erickson does. That's why it's unsurprising to find him on his blog (7/13/10) whipping up racial animus in the crudest possible terms, using the sort of rhetoric associated with actual brownshirts like David Duke. In the post, Erickson urged the Republicans to turn the New Black Panther "scandal" into the "21st [...]
Jul
08
2010
Bill O'Reilly Still Reaching on Immigrants and Crime
By 2 Comments
At the top of his show last night (7/7/10), BillO'Reillynotified viewers that the Factor had "investigated"how much crime in Arizona is committed by undocumented immigrants,explaining: "What we found may surprise you." "Telling the truth in the illegal immigration controversy, that is the subject of this evening's Talking Points Memo," O'Reilly began hiscommentary. Now that would be a surprise, given that O'Reilly spent weeks drumming up hysteria about Arizona's soaring crime rate (crime has been dropping for years) and attributing this to the surge in immigrants (which would run contrary to the research documenting lower crime rates in areas with higher [...]
Jul
06
2010
Kathleen Parker Channels Stephen Colbert
By 14 Comments
Syndicated columnist Kathleen Parker (umm, PULITZER Prize-winning columnist) got a lot of feedback abouther recent column ("Obama: Our First Female President," 6/30/10) suggesting that Barack Obama is kind of girly. She carefully pointed out that she was"not calling Obama a girlie president. But . . . he may be suffering a rhetorical-testosterone deficit when it comes to dealing with crises." So he's girly-sounding, I guess. Parker elaborated by suggesting that Obama "displays many tropes of femaleness. I say this in the nicest possible way." According to Parker's update column(7/4/10), many readers–including many black readers–did not think her assessment was particularly [...]
Jun
28
2010
NYT on Arizona's Immigrant Crime: Not as Bad as O'Reilly
By 1 Comment
We've rather amply documented Bill O'Reilly's record of misinformation on Arizona, immigration and crime. It's not surprising–but nonetheless worth documenting–that O'Reilly would bend reality in order to bash immigrants and defend the new Arizona law. But the way the New York Times handled the matter is worth a look. The paper's June 19 piece, "On Border Violence, Truth Pales Compared to Ideas," should have told a simple story: Supporters of the law claimed that Arizona was seeing a dramatic increase in crime, and immigrants were to blame for this. This is simply not true. But in the name of journalistic [...]
Jun
21
2010
O'Reilly Finds a New Way to Be Wrong About Immigration and Crime
By 16 Comments
Fox News host Bill O'Reilly has endorsed the draconian Arizona immigration law on the grounds that immigration has caused the state's crime to skyrocket–a claim that founders on the fact that crime in the state has actually gone down (FAIR Action Alert, 5/17/10). Of late, he hasn't talked much about the immigration/crime angle, leading us to wonder whether he had figured out that he was all wet on the subject (FAIR Activism Update, 6/4/10). But last Thursday (6/17/10), interviewing pro-immigration schoolteacher Jose Lara, O'Reilly returned to the topic with a fresh set of nonsense: LARA: The fact is, Bill, and [...]
May
19
2010
O'Reilly's Arizona Panic Continues
By 8 Comments
Fox host Bill O'Reilly continued his efforts to link Arizona's harsh immigration law to the non-existent immigrant crime wave. Last night (5/18/10), with Cathy Areu of Catalina magazine: O'REILLY: OK, so you would just sit there and just status quo it? Status quo? AREU: Immigration is down, actually, in Arizona. Status quo's working beautifully. O'REILLY: Down everywhere. AREU: Well, crime is down and immigration is down. So, actually, things are better. O'REILLY: Crime in Arizona is up. Immigration's down because of the economy. As we pointed in our Action Alert– and has been pointed out elsewhere by actual journalists–crime is [...]
May
12
2010
Newsweek and the Criminal Immigrants Next Door
By 24 Comments
Newsweek has another installment in the don't-blame-Arizonans coverage of the state's new immigration law (FAIR Blog, 4/28/10, 5/3/10, 5/4/10). Under the charming headline "Mexican Standoff," reporter Eve Conant writes: Some accuse lawmakers and the 70 percent of Arizonans who support the bill of acting like Nazis, or of turning Arizona into an apartheid state. But spend some time in Arizona, and you may come to see why so many Arizonans want this. The bulk of what follows is Conant's account of a month worth of ride-alongs with Arizona law enforcement officials, who showed her a number of ostensibly immigrant-related crimes. [...]
