Jeff Cohen for FAIR
For 40 years now, FAIR has raised hell about corporate media bias, censorship, and persistent exclusion of peace and justice voices. I left FAIR’s paid staff in the year 2000, but 26 years later, I still often receive totally undeserved thanks and compliments for FAIR’s excellent output that I had absolutely nothing to do with.
I came up with the idea for FAIR in the mid-1980s, when corporate news outlets were on bended knee for a reactionary, declining, war-mongering president—and when Reaganism was ushering in an era of dangerous media mergers. Thankfully, FAIR is still around to challenge today’s even worse media conglomeration—including the sinister, step-by-step power grab by Trumpite billionaire Larry Ellison of Oracle. And Paramount/Skydance. And TikTok. And perhaps Warner Bros. Discovery.
In the early years of FAIR, I would sometimes hear from journalists in corporate media who genuinely welcomed our presence—as a media watch group that cherished journalism, unlike media-bashing right-wing groups—but who thought we were putting far too much emphasis on media concentration as a villain. In the era of Ellison, FAIR is widely understood to have been correct, even prophetic.
In These Times‘ repost (3/8/16) of Adam Johnson’s FAIR piece (3/8/16).
FAIR’s staff today is not much bigger than in our early years, but its reach is immeasurably larger, thanks heavily to the Internet. It warms my heart when I’m reading one of my favorite news sites—whether Common Dreams or Truthout or Salon or whichever—and see they’ve reposted one of FAIR’s insightful articles. My heart was especially warmed ten years ago when I saw Bernie Sanders at a presidential campaign rally holding aloft a printout of a FAIR article that had gone viral: “Washington Post Ran 16 Negative Stories on Bernie Sanders in 16 Hours.”
Sanders was the first member of Congress to approach FAIR about working together to challenge corporate media bias. But he was not the first presidential candidate whose biased coverage prompted FAIR to speak out. That honor belongs to Jesse Jackson, whose 1988 campaign was subjected to persistently biased and patronizing coverage.
Advances in communication technology played a significant role in growing FAIR’s abilities. At our founding, our “dialogue” with offending news outlets took place in slow motion. Once we had a fax machine (and fax numbers sometimes provided by sympathetic insiders), FAIR could get under their skin instantaneously. We once faxed a complaint to the office of anchor Tom Brokaw about bias in that evening’s NBC Nightly News while he was still on the air; as soon as the program ended, Brokaw faxed us back an angry response. Victory! Our criticism was heard.
A FAIR study (3/18/03) found that in two weeks of TV news coverage before the Iraq invasion, only one out of 267 US sources represented an antiwar group.
In the pre-internet era, FAIR was one of the first progressive nonprofits to pay for the expensive Nexis database (and happily shared our resource with independent journalists). Nexis allowed FAIR to do serious studies of corporate media bias and censorship in a few days or weeks, rather than months. To give just one example, FAIR documented the TV networks’ near-total exclusion of antiwar voices in the run-up to the Iraq invasion (3 out of 393 on-camera sources), a study that Democracy Now!‘s Amy Goodman has cited year after year in her critique of establishment media.
Then came the internet, which put the organization in orbit through enhanced research and dissemination, such that candidates like Sanders could cite FAIR’s research on the campaign trail. FAIR has achieved global reach and a sterling global reputation, as I’ve learned over the years when traveling in Latin America and Europe.
Forty years on, what has been accomplished? We knew from day one that, given the corporate and commercial structures, a different media can only come as part of the broader battle for a more just society. But our main goals were always 1) to inform people why they should be skeptical of corporate media content; 2) to encourage activism against media bias and corporatization; and 3) to urge support for non-conglomerated, independent journalism.
FAIR was somewhat alone 40 years ago in disseminating an informed critique of corporate news and in spurring media activism. Today, I see a torrent of intelligent media criticism pouring out of independent outlets, social media, Substack, podcasts—and reaching millions of active citizens. It’s a roar. When I talk to these hugely successful progressive journalists and “influencers,” much younger than I, it’s rare that they don’t bring up how FAIR inspired them to do what they do.
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