fair

When you hear about a $5 billion election year, you probably wonder where that money is going. A good chunk of it, of course, goes into advertising--lots of money for the money media. But is that shaping coverage? And what about the supposedly non-money-media: NPR and PBS? A new study out from Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting, Taking the Public Out of Public TV, found that PBS's guests and hosts differ very little from those in the corporate media.Janine Jackson of FAIR and Zach Carter of the Media Consortium join Laura to discuss the media in the countdown to Election 2010: the good, the bad, and Juan Williams.

Oil gushers and Israeli commandoes dominated the headlines this week, but the news too often seemed to come from the same sources, over and over again. Cable news hosts and guests alike repeated the Israeli government's statements on the humanitarian crisis in Gaza--or what they termed a lack of one--and BP managed to continue to control access to its oil that is coating beaches in the Gulf of Mexico. For a look at this week's media mistakes, we turn to Jim Naureckas of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting.
 
While the world focused on the Freedom Flotilla and the BP oil still pouring into the Gulf, activists from around the U.S. converged in Arizona to protest the state's recent anti-immigrant legislation this past weekend. Recent GRITtv guest Marco Amador was there and sent us this report.
 
Health care reform made it through Congress and was signed by the President, and promptly disappeared from headlines aside from occasional Republican attempts or vows to repeal it. But the system is far from fixed, and hospital closings, budget cuts and understaffings contribute just as much to our nation's health care crisis. What can we do about it? To discuss the ongoing crunch on the medical profession, the problem with funding and the falling tax base, we asked Arthur Cheliotes of the Communications Workers of America union and Dr. Greg Dodell of the Committee of Interns and Residents and a resident physician at St. Lukes-Roosevelt Hospital in New York.
 
A picture's worth a thousand words, but what those words are depends a whole lot in America.

The right wing's favorite political football, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN, has announced that it will be closing down. What brought down the once-strong force for justice for low-income Americans? Concerted attacks from the right were the main cause, but, Jim Naureckas notes, inaccurate reporting by the nation's major news outlets didn't help. Naureckas is the editor of Extra!, the magazine put out by Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, the media watchdog organization, and he joins Laura to talk about the problems with the newspapers' accounts of the ACORN saga.

It's Super Bowl season, another year, another scandal. This year's outburst over CBS's $3 million Focus on the Family ad has revived the mythology around another Super Bowl ad, that one involving domestic violence. As a player in that story, I've come to anticipate game season: the domestic violence Super Bowl so-called "hoax" is one right-wing media-manufactured vampire that just won't die. Let me lay out the facts one more time. Shortly before the start of the Super Bowl on NBC in 1993, viewers saw a public service announcement that warned: "Domestic violence is a crime." The 30 second moment (worth roughly $500,000 to advertisers) was the result of many weeks of work by FAIR, the media watch group where I co-directed the Women's Desk, and a coalition of anti-violence groups in negotiations with executives at NBC and NBC Sports. License-holders to the biggest-revenue producing broadcast of the year, the networks, at the time, were required to air a free PSA every year. They'd never aired one on domestic violence. Workers at women's shelters, and some journalists, had long reported that Super Bowl Sunday is one of the year's worst days for violence against women in the home. FAIR hoped that the broadcast of an anti-violence PSA on Super Sunday, in front of the biggest TV audience of the year, would sound a wake-up call for the media, and it did. Helpful stories about a generally undercovered topic flooded the airwaves and hit the press for days before the game. But a handful of reporters and editors decided to "debunk" the story. The "debunkers," led by Ken Ringle of the Washington Post, (1/31/93), claimed that FAIR had slanted the facts and claimed that "national studies" linked Super Bowl Sunday to increased assaults. Similar stories ran almost simultaneously on the AP, the Boston Globe and the Wall Street Journal. Let me say it one more time. That wasn't FAIR's claim. In fact, FAIR made the point repeatedly that domestic violence is understudied and under-reported. Critics charged that the coalition was forced to "acknowledge" that its evidence was largely "anecdotal." But "anecdotal" was our word: I used it in countless interviews calling out for more reporting. In the Washington Post, Ringle painted a picture of a feminist mob strong-arming the networks with myth and false statistics. And that claim was quickly picked up by and amplified by professional anti-feminists Christina Hoff Sommers, the Independent Women's Forum and on and on.... But it was Ringle who distorted the facts. Washington Post readers to this day probably don't know that of the four experts cited by Ringle, only one agreed with the article's thesis. Ringle quoted psychotherapist Michael Lindsey to defend his point that the Super Bowl PSA campaign was misguided: "You know I hate this," Ringle quoted Lindsey saying. But Lindsey told FAIR that he was referring to Ringle's line of questioning, not the anti-battering campaign. "He was really hostile," Lindsey added. On the same day as Ringle's "debunking" story, Lindsey was quoted in the New York Times, saying, "The PSA will save lives." The F Word is a regular commentary by Laura Flanders, the host of GRITtv which broadcasts weekdays on satellite TV (Dish Network Ch. 9415 Free Speech TV) on cable, and online at GRITtv.org and TheNation.com. Follow GRITtv or GRITlaura on Twitter.com.