Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR) isn't pleased with the
media's recollection of the late President Ronald Reagan record,
particularly what sounds like fast and loose use of statistics about
his popularity:
"As the media spend the week memorializing Ronald Reagan, journalists
are redefining the former president's life and accomplishments with a
stream of hagiographies that frequently skew the facts and gloss over
scandal and criticism."
The FAIR critique includes examples from ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, CNN, NPR, MS-NBC, Time, The Washington Post, and The New York Times.
To make its case, a followup on its 1989 article "More Gloss for the Gipper: The Myth of Reagan's 'Enormous Popularity,'" FAIR uses Gallup poll numbers and the results of
Nexis searches, but unfortunately no Web links to the recent stories
it mentions. Tracking them down can be tedious. For example, the article closes with this paragraph:
Finally, Tom Rosenstiel of the Project for Excellence in Journalism (USA Today,
6/7/04) gave an interesting take on what he acknowledged were "almost
completely uncritical" media reports on Reagan: "For networks that are
accused of being liberal, this is a way for them to show that they are
fair." One would hope that such an overwhelmingly uncritical assessment
of important political and historical matters would not meet anyone's
definition of "fair" journalism.
I went looking for a USA Today article by Rosenstiel (of journalism.org), with no luck at first. It turns out the quote from him is part of a column by USA Today media columnist Peter Johnson.
I'm not a regular reader of political blogs, but perhaps some of them
have found more Web links to stories that are equivalents of those in
the pay-per-view Nexis archive FAIR uses.
Alas, FAIR also doesn't offer an RSS
feed of its Media Advisories, Action Alerts and Press Releases, which
puts it off the radar of many RSS-aggregator-dependent webloggers.
12:29:04 PM
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