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On FAIR:
Interviewing William McGowan on MSNBC's "Buchanan & Press," Bill Press confronted him with statistics from a recent FAIR study. At the mention of FAIR's name, co-host Pat Buchanan interrupted:

PAT BUCHANAN: That’s the most left-wing group in America!

BILL PRESS: Unlike you, tacking little stories together, they took a broad look at all the networks. And here’s what they showed....

--MSNBC's "Buchanan & Press" (7/25/02)

FAIR was one of Jane magazine’s picks for a “balanced news diet,” their listing of four “great alternative rags that won’t be bullied by advertisers or the government.”

--Jane (January/February 2002)

9/11 reporting errors:

CBS and anchor Dan Rather tripped… by repeating a report from local affiliate WCBS-TV that two people had been arrested by the FBI after being found in an explosives-filled truck beneath New York City’s George Washington Bridge. The report aired four times before being downgraded to ambiguous status, and was never corrected on the air, according to the media watchdog organization Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting, known as FAIR.

“There’s an idea that what wins the game in journalism is to get the rumor out first,” said Jim Naureckas, editor of the organization’s magazine Extra! “Really, you’re watching because you want to know what happened. If the State Department is bombed, you’d rather wait 20 minutes to find out if it really happened.”

“And Sept. 11, that’s when you’re supposed to step up to the plate, that’s when you’re supposed to do your best job as a journalist to separate fact from rumor rather than propagate rumors on your own,” he said.

--MSNBC.com (1/22/02)

Payola:

Peter Hart, an analyst with media watchdog group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, said the rise of the independent promoter created "a way for labels and stations to deny the traditional payola relationship."

When promoters own labels or manage artists, "it might make that relationship more clear. This [payment] is essentially [from] label to station, without a middleman," Hart said. "You would never want to say unknown acts shouldn't have access to the airwaves. But the reason why they're elevated to major airplay will strike listeners as peculiar."

--Los Angeles Times (12/27/01)

Geraldo in Afghanistan:

[Geraldo] also has said he carries a gun, which isn't exactly standard-issue equipment for journalists.

"That's a violation of the Geneva Convention," says Jim Naureckas of the New York media watch group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting. "There's a good reason why reporters there are noncombatants. They're given protection under the Geneva Convention, but as soon as we start arming them, they are combatants. He's putting everyone in danger."

You could say that's just Rivera's style. When he was readying to go to Afghanistan, he said of Osama bin Laden: "I'll kick his head in, then bring it home and bronze it."

"If you watch his reports, they're not really about what's going on," Naureckas says. "They're about this brave survivor of the ground zero attack in New York boldly going to put his personal macho on the line."

--Atlanta Journal-Constitution (12/20/01)

"Synergy":

According to a report by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, which studied the three network morning shows for two weeks in June and two weeks in October, these programs spend an awful lot of time selling things to the public.[…]

"Television is a medium for hawking products," says Jeff Cohen, founder of the liberal media watchdog group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting and a Fox News Channel media critic. "These kinds of surveys, I think, debunk the rhetoric that TV network journalists today make their own completely independent news judgments."

--Boston Globe (11/21/01)

Women and 9/11:

"As someone who monitors the media for a living, I've noticed stories featuring women as heroes have been absent," said Steve Rendall, senior analyst for Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting, a New York-based media watchdog group. "We've seen scores of stories featuring funerals of firemen, Port Authority officers, but I haven't seen one ... featuring women as the subject of the stories."

--Scripps Howard News Service (11/18/01)

Civilian Casualties

Now reports are surfacing that CNN efforts to keep U.S. public opinion and public officials happy include playing down some of the grimmer images from Afghanistan. On Nov. 1, The New York Times reported CNN and other U.S. networks are offering only "fleeting" images of civilian casualties compared to the "more frequent and lingering" views shown abroad. There are also Washington Post reports that CNN management has directed anchors to balance casualty scenes with reminders that it is the Taliban's own fault. For an excellent, detailed account of this controversy, see "CNN Says Focus on Civilian Casualties Perverse" on the Website of the media monitoring organization FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting).

--Tokyo Daily Yomiuri (11/8/01)

Globalization coverage:

It is no surprise that most editorial opinion in the U.S. press has leaned heavily toward the corporate side of these debates, although the degree of the tilt can be startling. In a database search for the month of April, around the time of the Quebec City protests, the liberal media watch group Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting counted thirty-five editorials in major newspapers in favor of the Free Trade Area of the Americas, the issue that brought Western leaders and tens of thousands of protesters to Quebec City. The number of editorials against the agreement: zero. FAIR found op-ed pages also skewed -- twenty-five opinion pieces in favor of the agreement, nine against.[…]

…poor coverage of the globalization-related events is feeding something of a media backlash. "I think that a lot of people who had not been interested in media criticism before are very concerned about the coverage," says Rachel Coen, a media analyst at FAIR, "and they are drawing some connections between globalization and corporate-owned media."

--Columbia Journalism Review (September/October 2001)

Military "experts":

Rick Karr: Most of the consultants [TV] networks have hired since September 11th have been experts on military strategy and tactics, counterterrorism and geopolitics, according to Steve Rendall, an analyst for the liberal media watchdog group Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting. Decision makers at the networks say military topics are simply the most newsworthy right now, but Rendall says that presumes military action is the only answer.

Mr. Steve Rendall (Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting): They'll hire ex-generals or ex-national security types or ex-foreign policy types who come from a set of former or current policy-makers. But they don't, likewise, hire policy critics.

--NPR, All Things Considered (10/10/01)

NYT publishes FAIR letter on civil liberties:

In "Democratic Gains Falter With Tighter Security in Central Europe" (news article, Oct. 4), you report that Amnesty International has warned that, in the name of fighting terrorism, "governments from Hungary to China" are increasing law enforcement's powers at the expense of human rights.

The article does not mention, however, that the United States is the first country Amnesty expresses concern about in its new report, "The Backlash: Human Rights at Risk Throughout the World." Amnesty warns that proposed United States antiterrorism legislation "could erode basic constitutional freedoms" by expanding the government's powers to detain immigrants, and that the legislation's broad definition of terrorism could criminalize many types of nonviolent political association.

Rachel Coen
The writer is a media analyst, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting.

--New York Times (10/7/01)

Using U.S. flag graphics in war reporting:

"At a time when many see the media as beating the drums for war, imposing the U.S. flag over what should be balanced reporting doesn't help," said FAIR senior analyst Steve Rendall. "It reinforces the view that the media are not independent."

--Chicago Tribune & Associated Press (9/22/01)

Where are the peace experts?

Steve Rendall, a senior analyst at Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, or FAIR, a media watchdog organization in New York, questioned the constant drumbeat from diplomatic experts such as former secretaries of state Henry Kissinger, Madeleine Albright, James Baker and Alexander Haig.

"The pundit offering is one-sided," he said. "Where are the experts on international law? Where are the experts who might take Martin Luther King and Mohandas Gandhi seriously? The peace experts? You might think that's a joke, but there are people who study these things as seriously as war."

--San Francisco Chronicle (9/19/01)

On FAIR:

Boy, do they have some serious scoops!

--Houston Chronicle (6/12/01)

Payola:

Internal documents obtained by the Los Angeles Times indicate that several independent promoters keep detailed logs--called "banks"--listing the date a station airs a song followed by a dollar amount collected from the artist's label…. Experts say the newly disclosed bank data could threaten the licenses of numerous stations.

"This document destroys the notion that the new payola is any different from the old payola," said Peter Hart, an analyst for the New York-based media watchdog group Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting.

"What you have here is a smoking gun. This document confirms suspicions that critics have long had about potential tit-for-tat arrangements between independent promoters and radio stations. An appropriate government investigation could blow this whole industry wide open."

--Los Angeles Times (5/29/01), also cited by Associated Press (5/30/01)

Product Placement:

Jim Naureckas, editor of Extra, the national media watch group Fair's magazine, sees a danger in advertisers' increasing input into content. Companies, he said, are reacting to the failure of Web advertising to prove effective and the sense that TV advertising is at risk because of developments such as TiVo, which allows viewers to skip the commercials entirely.

"Advertisers are concerned that they're going to get shut out, so the next step is to build advertising into the [movies and] TV programs," Naureckas said, noting the continued rise of product placement as well as shows in development that spotlight McDonalds and other brands.

--Chicago Tribune (5/16/01)

Web Activism & Globalization:

The organizations attending [the World Social Forum in] Porto Alegre decided that it was high time to take on this "ideological apparatus" [of the corporate media], using the Internet as their chief weapon….

A leading example is FAIR, the best known media watchdog in North America. The organization aims to show how the structures of media conglomerates dictate content: the topics and viewpoints developed are those of an economic and political elite because these media belong to multinationals and are financed by others via advertising.

According to Seth Ackerman, one of FAIR's staff members, the Internet boasts three advantages over other forms of communication, including the group's magazine quarterly Extra!. First, it provides instant access to a wide range of alternative news sources, allowing the network to pick up on important matters ignored by North American mainstream media or to reveal a fine-tuned understanding of biased coverage. Secondly, FAIR can dispatch to-the minute analyses at minimal cost to subscribers. Thirdly, it can involve subscribers in the organization's campaigns by encouraging them to email protest messages to media in FAIR's spotlight. "Thanks to the Internet, our activities made such huge quantitative leap that they've also changed qualitatively," says Ackerman.

--UNESCO Courier (5/1/01)

Covering Dissent:

The Seattle experience shows that the acts of a handful of protesters can quickly be seized upon by authorities - and even the news media - to discredit the broader movement and its cause.

That's what television networks CNN and CBS did at the height of the Seattle events, says the U.S. media watchdog group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting. Both networks, it says, aired misleading news reports stating police had used tear gas and concussion grenades "in response" to violent anarchists when, in fact, the police assault was directed first and foremost at the peaceful protesters, not the vandals. It was but one of many instances in which mainstream media mischaracterized the protesters, portraying them as angry, irrational people opposed to all trade, the media watchdog group says

--Montreal Gazette (4/16/01)

School Shootings:

A representative of a New York organization called Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting said news media are giving too much coverage to school killings compared to other shootings.

Jim Naureckas, who publishes the group's magazine, said the "saturation coverage" of every shooting may motivate troubled youngsters seeking revenge and attention.

"The media should sit down and give some thought to the newsworthiness of these stories," Naureckas said. "Think about the real impact these events have on peoples lives."

--Kansas City Star (3/24/01)

Clear Channel:

Critics contend that the broadcast giant is using its newfound leverage as the nation's largest chain to extract deals from record labels that appear to sidestep payola laws.

"Clear Channel is trying to skirt the law, using its power to shake down record companies in what amounts to legal payola," said Steve Rendall, senior analyst for the New York-based media watchdog group FAIR.

--Los Angeles Times (3/9/01)

Best of the Web:

Talking back to the media is somewhat easier than it used to be, thanks to the Internet…. Until recently that was a privilege reserved for members of the established media or for ombudsmen who were supposedly self-policing at some media. If the newsboys and girls were nice they might even run a short letter to the editor from the aggrieved. If they felt like it….

Since then, the electronic criticism has become more systematic and organized. There are Web sites for such established press watchdogs as Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting…

--Forbes "Best of the Web" (2/26/01)

Class Warfare:

Conservative groups that document liberal media bias often study word choices…. Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), a left-wing group, apparently decided that turnabout was fair play. FAIR's Steve Rendell studied the use of "class warfare," which you'll be hearing a lot in the weeks ahead as liberals complain that Bush's tax cut would benefit the wealthy most. Conservatives often denounce this complaint as "class warfare."

Rendell studied nine top news publications and TV news shows for references to class warfare for a five-year period ending July 2000. He found that by a ratio of 7-1, the media were more likely to describe as class warfare "bottom-up actions _ language or policies perceived as favoring the less powerful" than they were to describe "top-down actions, or actions perceived to favor the powerful."

Perhaps you're thinking the study turned out that way because conservatives use "class warfare" more often than liberals do. And that's so. FAIR found that sources quoted by journalists were nine times more likely to use class-war metaphors in describing bottom-up actions. But when FAIR counted the 159 uses of class-war terminology in the supposedly objective voice of the reporter, the ratio was still almost 7-1.

--Minneapolis Star Tribune (2/23/01)

John Ashcroft:

As the watchdog publication Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting has said: "When Attorney General nominee John Ashcroft praised the neo-Confederate magazine Southern Partisan, he was endorsing a publication that defends slavery, white separatism, apartheid and David Duke."… Questions about Bob Jones and Southern Partisan came up at Ashcroft's confirmation hearing on Wednesday. He said he rejected racial and religious intolerance. But the man who should be called to account for this appallingly divisive nomination is George W. Bush, whose inaugural festivities got under way on Thursday -- at the Lincoln Memorial.

--Bob Herbert, New York Times (1/18/01)