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The Media's Construction of the 'Ground Zero Mosque': How Islamophobic blogs manufactured a controversy
By Steve Rendall and Alex Kane


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Communique
The Afghan War, Past and Present
10/8/10


This week, as the Afghan War entered its 10th year, there were the usual retrospectives in the media, as well as calls to rethink the war. What's striking, though, is how little thinking media did about the war in the first place.

--Some pundits were calling for indiscriminate attacks before the Afghanistan War even started, as FAIR noted (9/21/01):



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  • Posted by Jim Naureckas on 10/14/10 at 12:30 pm
    David Broder--or an automated David Broderesque column-generator--bemoaned once again (Washington Post, 10/14/10) that "As the Gulf Between GOP and Democrats Widens, the Center Is Lost." To illustrate this dire situation, Broder (or the Broderbot) cited congressional voting patterns: Bill Galston, the Brookings Institution's resident political philosopher, was the first of the day to point out that, [...] Read more»
  • Posted by Peter Hart on 10/14/10 at 10:35 am
    Washington Post columnist Steven Pearlstein wrote a piece yesterday (10/13/10) headlined "Wage Cuts Hurt, but They May Be the Only Way to Get Americans Back to Work." The point--in case you didn't catch the drift of the headline--is that workers are going to need to take pay cuts in order to get the U.S. economy back on track. U.S. workers simply make too much in comparison to international competitors.

    Pearlstein cheers the move by some U.S. autoworkers to take a pay cut--the kind of "structural adjustments that are necessary if the U.S. economy is to find a new equilibrium." But taking a 20 percent pay cut sure isn't for everyone:

    I'm sure many of you are reading this and thinking that if anyone is forced to take a pay cut to rebalance the economy, surely it ought to be overpaid investment bankers, corporate executives and newspaper columnists. That's how things would work in a socialist paradise, but not in market economies, which are much better at producing efficiency than fairness.

    While it's good that Pearlstein anticipates the reaction of his readers, his argument is entirely unconvincing. [...] Read more»

  • Posted by Peter Hart on 10/13/10 at 11:52 am
    USA Today (10/13/10):

    [...] Read more»

  • Posted by Jim Naureckas on 10/13/10 at 8:17 am
    In the era of social media, the audience itself has a big say in how big the audience is. If you'd like FAIR's messages to reach more people, there's a number of simple things you can do to help.

    1. Comment on the blog. A lively comment section draws readers to a blog. If you want an interesting conversation about media criticism, post the kinds of comments you think are interesting.

    2. E-mail links to your friends. The simplest way to share content on the Internet--just copy and paste the url and send it to interested parties.

    3. Post links on Facebook. Sharing sources of information with your friends is one of the key functions of the leading social networking site. If you click on the "Share" link at the bottom of each blog post, there's a Facebook button that should streamline the sharing process. But copying and pasting the link works just as well. Of course, if you and your friends are on other social networking sites, those can spread the word too.
    [...] Read more»

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