Thursday, August 23, 2007
Things I Learned from FAIR This Week
Rightist press barons like Henry Luce and William Randolph Hearst helped to turn Billy Graham from an obscure preacher into an evangelical celebrity—Hearst, for example, commanding his editors in 1949 to "Puff Graham." Sounds vaguely dirty, doesn't it?
The Bush election team in 1999 got some major newspapers to agree to do puff pieces on Bush's tax plan, offering them early access to it on the condition that they not show it to any outside analysts—such as economists or accountants who might, you know, verify that the claims about it were correct. Oh, that liberal media.
ABC News is running a five-part series on "NASCAR in Primetime" which even the New York Times notes has pretty much nothing new to say about NASCAR—though it does drum up added attention for a sport carried by ABC Sports and ESPN, two of ABC News's siblings in the Disney corporate family. Gee, what a coincidence.
