Corporate Both-Sidesing Threatens Democracy: Help Fight It by Supporting FAIR
Dear FAIR Friends,
In the first edition of FAIR’s publication Extra! in 1987, founder Jeff Cohen wrote about FAIR’s mission: It’s not to demonize the working press, but to fight against “the increasing concentration of the US media in fewer and fewer corporate hands.”
More than three decades later, corporate media outlets continue to echo one another and rely on false notions that “objectivity” means giving equal weight to both sides — even when one side is deliberately deceptive.
At FAIR, we work to hold media to standards of critical reporting that gets to the root of issues.
Media Manage to Both-Sides Georgia GOP’s Suppressing Democracy Julie Hollar critiqued establishment media’s lazy balancing act between Republican lawmakers introducing bills to suppress voters — and Democrats trying to stop them. Reporting in outlets like the New York Times, CBS, ABC and NPR served to euphemize and rationalize Republicans' explicit goal of silencing voters who vote against them.
CounterSpin: Chip Gibbons on Drone Whistleblower Daniel Hale
Janine Jackson spoke to Chip Gibbons, policy director of the group Defending Rights & Dissent, about Daniel Hale, who was convicted of breaking a law aimed at spies for revealing information about the victims of the US drone program to journalists--and the public--that the government wanted to hide. Meanwhile, corporate media vouch for the government by praising its “counterterrorism” methods and remain largely silent on Hale’s story.
Good journalism is a crucial buttress of democracy, but lazy, status quo reporting just serves to insulate the powerful from accountability. Your support of FAIR’s work champions the former. To ensure our work never panders to monied interests, we don’t accept advertisements or corporate funders. Therefore, it is YOU, our readers and listeners, who keep FAIR going. Your donations are the reason we can pay our staff, writers, transcribers, radio engineer, utilities and the landlord, and every donation counts.
Please take advantage of our spring appeal to support our fearless and hardworking team, so that we can keep doing what we set out to do decades ago: give our readers the truth.
