Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting

10/31/2025

The dynamic between healthcare media and their Wall Street analyst sources keeps readers focused on the insurance companies’ need to not spend the money they collect in premiums, rather than paying for what their customers think they paid for.

When insurance stock prices dropped sharply, business journalists fretted that private looting of the healthcare system might end.

10/31/2025

The scattered headlines we’re seeing on COP30 – the annual UN climate conference, this year to be held in Brazil – indicate a distressing lack of US media attention to the galloping harms of climate disruption...and their negligence in calling countries and corporations to account.

News media need to locate the climate fight in the boardrooms of greedy people perversely trying to wring every last dime from our shared future.

10/29/2025

Transcript of CounterSpin's interview with Katya Schwenk on AI surveillance pricing:

"The airlines, and other people who use these kinds of pricing tools, would like consumers to think that everyone’s getting their own personalized discount. But, of course, we know that if there is no set rate or baseline set fare, there’s not really a way to get a discount on that fare.... The idea behind this pricing strategy, and why it’s so popular among these companies, is because they are trying to maximize the amount of money they can get any given consumer to pay."

"Consumers don't actually have very much choice in many of these circumstances. So it's not like they're able to choose a lower fare from a competitor, often."

10/28/2025

Transcript of CounterSpin's interview with the ACLU's Jeffrey Stein on Trump's extrajudicial killings:

"It's flagrantly illegal, under both domestic and international law, to summarily kill civilians who are suspected of committing crimes. And for this reason, members of Congress from across the political spectrum, former government officials who served in presidential administrations of both parties, international bodies and numerous civil society organizations have all agreed that these strikes constitute murder, pure and simple. "

"The public should be able to read the government's legal justification right now, while there's still an opportunity to stop these illegal and dangerous strikes."

10/27/2025

Transcript of CounterSpin's interview with Cara Brumfield on erasing federal data:

"How will we be able to measure the impact of those cuts to SNAP, our country's extremely successful food support program? How will we measure the impact of these cuts on families who rely on those benefits to be able to put food on the table? We won't. We won’t be able to do that without reliable access to accurate and unbiased federal data--in this case, through our survey questions on food security, which have just been cut."

"Manipulating the Decennial Census for political gain is so deeply undemocratic, and we need to talk about it in those terms."

10/25/2025

The New York Times sees its role as establishing the ideological boundaries of the Democratic Party, most notably by drawing the line in the sand on the left that the Democrats must not cross.

Two days after massive pro-democracy marches, the New York Times published a forceful message of its own—not against fascism, but against progressivism.

10/25/2025

"So you have a model that says, 'We’re going to prevent terrorism before it happens.' The FBI has to go out and find the terrorist. They don’t need evidence of wrongdoing of the person they’re going to investigate. We’re going to define terrorism by political ideology, and the threat today is anarchists, which are people who are anti-capitalist, anti-globes.... Anti-American, extremists on gender. What is the FBI agent reading these orders going to do? They’re going to go out and look for everyone in their area of responsibility that they think has anti-capitalist, 'extremist on gender' views….

"And these are Joint Terrorism Task Force, too.... So a lot of them are staffed by local police, operating as FBI terrorism officers under FBI guidelines. So now you have someone who’s like the Boise police officer, he’s been deputized by the FBI to run the terrorism task force, and now he’s told he has to find all the terrorists in Boise who have extreme views on gender. It’s a nightmare situation."

"It's not just that it's written in such a way that it opens the door to political policing. That was the original intent."

10/24/2025

The Pentagon is closing its doors to the press, and by extension the rest of the public, at a time of ramping up violence off the coasts of South America--and in American cities.

The Trump administration is throwing real reporters out of the Pentagon even as Trump is using the military in unprecedented ways.

10/24/2025

An October 20 Reuters piece begins: “When two alleged drug traffickers survived a US military strike last week in the Caribbean, they left the Trump administration with a decision to make: send them back home, or find a way to keep them detained.”

Already a lot going on there: "Alleged" drug traffickers – so not tried or convicted – and they "survived," which means that other people not tried or convicted of drug trafficking were killed – in a ‘military strike’ – OK, even if they’re drug traffickers, why is the US military doing the thing? “In the Caribbean” – so does the US control that region?

And after all that’s been transmitted without friction in a single clause, we’re to interest ourselves in the matter of how the Trump administration can figure out a way to sell the action, and the more like it we can presumably expect. The headline: “In Trump's Drug War, Prisoners May Be Too Much of a Legal Headache, Experts Say.”

This, things as they are, is not even the worse kind of piece: it poses questions, anyway – but the questions are about how the administration MIGHT use the law more skillfully to address the “complex set of legal and political problems, experts say” accrue when you kill people your country is not at war with, and who have faced no judge or jury.

Not everyone is waiting on the White House to puzzle up a new line to sell about why the US military killing unconvicted foreign people on charges they will never see, is not just okey-doke, but, as JD Vance puts it, “the highest and best use of our military.” Jeffrey Stein is staff attorney with the ACLU’s National Security Project, which is pressing the administration for transparency.

Corporate reporters scratch their heads over how this bombing campaign might be legal, rather than discussing what tools can respond to wildly illegal actions.

10/23/2025

Machado’s award coincided with an escalation of US military threats against Venezuela, meaning that corporate pundits used a “peace” prize as a platform for war propaganda.

Rather than scrutinize María Corina Machado credentials, the media establishment whitewashed the most unpeaceful elements in her background.

10/21/2025

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10/16/2025

The Washington Post mischaracterizes the political situation in France, saying that the main divide is “between those who want the country to change and those who insist it cannot.” The split is actually between those who want to cut social spending and those who want to raise taxes.

The idea that France may not be able to afford its social spending is a fantasy Washington Post reporters are presenting to their readers as fact.