Email an article

From (enter your email address here):

Recipient (email address):	Additional recipient (optional):	Additional recipient (optional):


Your message: (optional, limit 100 characters)
I thought you might be interested in the article from the FAIR web site. The following article will be appended to your message: Fear & Favor 2002 -- The Third Annual Report By Janine Jackson and Peter Hart and Rachel Coen It would be hard to overstate the impact of news media in shaping public opinion, on issues from healthcare to plans for war. With media such an influence on us, it’s crucial that we understand who’s influencing media. FAIR’s annual Fear & Favor report is an attempt to chart some of the pressures that push and pull mainstream journalists away from their fundamental work of telling the truth and letting the chips fall where they may. These include pressures from advertisers, well aware of their key role in fueling the media business; from media owners, who frequently use their journalistic outlets to draw attention to, or away from, their other corporate interests; and from the state, as the last year has made especially clear, with the Bush administration doing its best to promote its own spin on events and to tamp down dissent. While by no means exhaustive, Fear & Favor offers specific illustrations of these broad phenomena, in the belief that an understanding of the forces at work and their concrete, day-to-day impact will help media consumers decode the news they get, and recognize what news they do not get, from the corporate press. As always, this report is dedicated to journalists who continue to stand up for independent reporting—like Kathy Finn, former editor of New Orleans’ CityBusiness, who was fired in 2002 after objecting to a series of commercial encroachments including the introduction of “advertiser-sponsored news pages” (CJR, 9–10/02). One wonders: What are the odds the paper would hire someone who shared Finn’s ideas to replace her? And how many outlets are left where she, and journalists like her, can work without such constraints? These questions should concern not just reporters who want to work without fear or favor, but the public that relies on that reporting. In Advertisers We Trust To read the rest of the article, please click on the link below. http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=1130 This article was published on Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting's Website (http://www.fair.org).

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

Site designed by the May First Technology Collective