Jeff Cohen: This Is What Real Journalism Should Look Like
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FSTV Presents: Rising Up for Justice
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Welcome to Rising Up for Justice, a
special weekly series presented by
Rising Up with Sonali, an independently
produced subscriber supported program
syndicated to radio stations, free
speech, TV, and podcast platforms. I'm
Sonali Kolhutker, host and executive
producer. Our nation and our world are
overrun by billionaires and bigots, but
they are few and we are many. On this
series exclusive to subscribers of
Rising Up with Sonali and viewers of
Free Speech TV, you'll hear
conversations with change makers in the
movements for social justice and dig
into the nuts and bolts of values,
strategies, tactics, narratives, and
building power. This week on Rising Up
for Justice, my guest is Jeff Cohen,
columnist, activist, former journalism
professor, and author of Cable News
Confidential. He founded the media
watchdog group Fair in 1986 and
co-founded rootsaction.org in 2011.
Welcome to the program, Jeff.
Great to be with you, Sali.
So, you are here to talk about fair,
which stands for fairness and accuracy
in reporting. It is a a very valuable
institution that I have relied on whose
work I've relied on over my couple of
decades doing this. Tell me um and for
our audience who aren't familiar with
fair's work, what it is and what its
main goals are.
uh Bear Monitors Media,
does studies of media bias and
censorship and exclusion.
They've done it for 40 years. They're
celebrating their 40th birthday at fair.
I was the founder.
Uh, I'd say the three goals are number
one to spread the word that people
should be skeptical
of mainstream media, be on the lookout
for bias and censorship. I think we've
particularly taught
critical news consumers that they have
to always pay attention to sources and
experts.
which sources and experts are in the
story and which have been excluded from
the story. So that's number one is
teaching skepticism about corporate news
media. The second uh goal of fair has
always been to spur media activism
against bias against exclusion against
censorship and against the corporate
takeover of media. And the third goal of
fair has been to support independent
journalists, independent news outlets
that operate outside of the
conglomerated media. And Sali, you're
one of those journalists uh that fair
tries to
bring attention to as doing journalism
the right way as opposed to what passes
for journalism in the conglomerated
dominated news media. There are
organizations who will critique
right-wing media and indeed I think most
uh people who are liberal-minded in this
country understand that outlets like Fox
News are deeply problematic. But
interestingly, fair tends to focus on
Fox News's enemies, the so-called
liberal media. And I'm wondering if you
can interrogate that a little bit
because often fair picks up on things on
on biases on assumptions that even I as
a seasoned journalist might miss and
then I see because you guys are the
experts and then I see fair's analysis
and I realize the built-in assumptions
in outlets like the New York Times or
NPR. So, how do you explain that to
people who think that the Times and NPR
are on the right side of media coverage?
Well, they may think that until they see
that fair far critique the New York
Times since 1986,
public broadcasting since 1986.
Who are the experts? Who aren't? Who's
excluded? What are the biases? So people
that have been reading fair stuff
fair.org or no, I mean at the New York
Times when we started in the 80s,
they were putting forward so many myths
about the Sandinista government in
Nicaragua
and Fair would chronicle how in the US
supported regimes of Central America in
the 80s like El Salvador, like Guatemala
when opposition figures were murdered,
uh, half dozen of them, it would be on
the back page of the New York Times.
But if the Sandinista government, a
left-wing government, detained
right-wing Contras after they'd met with
the Washington,
uh, you know, supporters of the
right-wing after they'd met with people
in Washington who were supporting the
Contra War and they'd be interrogated at
the at the airport in Managua, Nicaragua
for a few hours. That was front page
news.
Now, unless you're doing this kind of
scrutiny, as Fair does, you might not
know that
uh Fair did a study of public TV uh
NewsHour and how it had a white male
conservative
uh guest list. And unless you studied
months of the NewsHour, if you just
watched it once in a while on PBS, you
might not know that. But when fair does
this study, it's overwhelming that when
it came to foreign policy,
the uh newsshour at PBS kept relying on
a militarist think tank called the
Center for Strategic and International
Studies. And when they discussed
economics and politics, they were
relying on the American Enterprise
Institute, a conservative
corporatefunded think tank. There are
many think tanks in Washington but on
public TV you are only hearing from
these uh conservative think tanks and
the the left of center think tanks were
largely excluded with public radio
did this report on how and this is
typical of public radio it's typical of
the New York Times it's typical of
public TV and I teach people and fair
has always taught
When you hear a former government
official only identified as a former,
you're probably being lied to because
these people that get on TV and radio
and in the New York Times over and over
and over who used to be assistant
secretaries of state, uh, deputy uh,
secretaries of defense, former members
of Congress, former chief of staff for
president, presidents,
what they are doing today is far more
important than what they might have done
5, 10, 15 years ago. So at public radio
in the 90s when health care was being
debated, healthc care reform, you had a
former Democratic Congress member
allegedly debating a former Republican
Congress member and both of them were
dismissing out of hand the idea that
singlepayer, what's now called Medicare
for all might be a good idea. They just
dismissed it. both of them, the former
Democrat Congress member and the former
Republican. What the listeners were not
told
until fair made a stink of it, and we
actually bought a quarter page ad in the
New York Times.
What listeners of NPR did not know is
that both former Congress members
dismissing Medicare for all were
currently consultants or lobbyists for
for-profit corporate healthc care
interests. And I would argue that that's
important information for the listeners
to know. So that's the only way that you
become skeptical of what we call the
corporate centrist media or the
corporate liberal media is if someone's
doing this kind of indepth research and
doing these long studies of who's
getting on the air, who isn't, who's
being quoted in the New York Times, who
isn't. And unless someone's doing that
for you, it's easy to think, as you
said, Sali, that these corporate outlets
of the center are somehow on my side and
they're vastly different than Fox News,
right?
And it's it's a huge myth. And and I
would argue if there's one thing I can
leave your viewers and listeners with,
listen to how often or when you're
reading the Times or the Washington
Post, someone's just identified as a
former Obama chief of staff, a former
top aid to President Clinton, positions
they had 5, 10, 20 years ago, and
they're not identified by what they're
doing now. Like when CNN would bring out
Jim Msina, not the singer, the political
operative, and he would bring him on
during the in the 2020 election. He was
always bashing Bernie Sanders. It was
just introduced as a former Obama
campaign manager.
What CNN didn't tell their viewers, and
you wouldn't know it, is that Jim Msina
was currently
a consultant at the highest level for
Uber,
for a uh Amazon's pharmaceutical
division, for all these big corporations
that Bernie Sanders was critical of. So,
if Jim Msina had been properly
identified
by CNN, people would say, "Oh, okay.
This guy's a corporate guy, a corporate
consultant guy. I understand why he
hates Bernie Sanders who's critical of
these big businesses on behalf of
consumers and on behalf of workers, but
CNN didn't tell them. So, it's, you
know, just always be wary when someone's
identified merely as a former official.
So, it's really interesting to to think
about the fact that these uh reasonable
sounding media outlets are in fact
protecting the status quo. One that
doesn't work for most Americans. Let's
go back to the beginnings of fair. Fair,
as you said, is celebrating its 40th
anniversary this year, which is
remarkable. Congratulations to you, to
the fair team. But tell us that story of
how and why you founded Fair. What was
the inspiration for realizing that there
was a need for such an organization?
Well, there had been a right-wing media
watch group, a media bashing group. They
hated journalists almost on principle.
It was called AIM, accuracy in media.
And they would get meetings with the New
York Times publisher. And they would
anyone who was doing decent reporting in
mainstream centrist outlets would be
attacked by accuracy in media. So that
existed before fair and in the mid80s
we had this declining wararmongering
President Reagan who'd made jokes on a
hot mic about nuking the Soviet Union.
The coverage of Reagan in the New York
Times in public broadcasting and they
kept telling us how popular he was. He
actually wasn't a very popular
president. Compare him to others he
wasn't. But there was this myth of the
hugely popular Reagan and the corporate
liberal outlets were on bended knee.
There's a whole book about it called on
bended knee by Mark Herdzgard. So that
was the beginning of fair that I
couldn't believe how the corporate
liberal or corporate centrist whatever
you want to call them media were just
soft. They were as soft on Reagan, who
was a really dangerous individual, as
they were later soft on Biden a couple
years ago. Uh, and then there was
another factor. Entertainment
conglomerates were taking over the news.
Giant corporations,
the the media were concentrating in the
hands of fewer and fewer big
corporations. The good news, Sali, and
you're a big part of this, is that
independent, non-corporate news is
growing and and people are finding their
way. You obviously don't have
advertising budgets. Democracy Now
doesn't. The Young Turks don't. Uh but
uh millions of people are now getting
their news, this is almost unheard of,
every day, almost every hour, from
non-corporate sources. So that's the
good news in today's media environment.
So just to kind of clarify for our
audience, fair is it's a small outlet.
You've got researchers and writers whose
entire job it is to read these
supposedly centrist liberal uh that
often end up being right-wing and
protecting the status quo. Uh media
outlets that have reputations for being
fair. and you analyze them, you find the
patterns, you publish studies, you
publish reports, you publish data that
allows people to see through
what's really being reported and then
what how does that help fuel change? How
can people how do people use or how does
fair itself use its own work to pressure
these outlets to do better?
Well, that's where activism comes in
into play. We call it media activism.
When Reagan was making jokes about
blowing up the Soviet Union and all its
inhabitants, our slogan was uh better
media active than radioactive.
So if people go to the top of Far's
website and uh click on email network,
they'll become one of tens of thousands
of media activists that gets this
hardcore research from fair. and fair
makes it very easy for you to then send
an email to the New York Times or
complain to NPR that they've got two
people debating health care and both of
them work for the for-profit healthc
care industry. So that's the key is, you
know, a lot of it is shame. You know,
when you're talking about mainstream
media, you have to shame them, these
corporate centrist outlets. Um, I
remember when Fair did its first study
of uh of Ted Cppel's Night Line, uh,
which was the most prestigious show on
ABC News. And we found that the guest
list through studying 40 months, 865
different shows, that the guest list was
dominated by white male conservatives
and militarists
and and uh racial minorities and their
advocates were largely excluded. Labor
was totally excluded. So when you see
these kinds of studies, it empowers
activists to raise hell. And the other
thing fair has always been good about is
attacking say television news in the
mainstream dailies. When we attacked NPR
for their phony debate on healthc care
reform, we bought a a quarter page ad in
the New York Times and on that morning I
got three calls from NPR executives
claiming that they're going to change
things because we had shamed them. When
we did the study of Night Line, a
mainstream daily in Pennsylvania
ran a news story about a a wire service
story about our study, very accurate.
Here's what the study found. Here's the
biases of Night Line on ABC News.
And the caption they showed next to the
wire story they ran a photograph of Ted
Cppel uh with a very unusual segment
they had done trying to explain economic
terms and they had used the Muppets. So
the picture was Ted Cppel with Kermit
the Frog. And this is a mainstream daily
not an alternative counterculture
weekly. The mainstream daily using
fair's research has a caption Ted Cppel
of Night Line making one of his rare
appearances with a representative of a
minority group
meaning Kermit the Frog. So, and you
know we had there was a black columnist
in mainstream dailies who started
referring to Night Line as white line.
And so I think that's the key is media
activism can shame these outlets that
purport to be operating without fear and
fear or favor like the New York Times or
PBS NPR saying that they're public,
you know, media but acting some ways
like the private media and excluding the
same progressive points of view that the
corporate outlets are excluded. And I
think what fair has done is they've
taught activists to be skeptical and to
take action. And then just as important,
support independent news outlets. If you
know of good news independent outlets,
whether it's Free Speech TV, Rising Up
with Sali, and you know that your
friends and neighbors and relatives
don't yet know about it, use your social
media, use your email, spread the word
because Sali did not does not have a
multi-million dollar advertising budget
like CBS [snorts] News does.
And that is a great segue to ask you
about the question of how you tell the
story of why these news media outlets
behave the way they do, right? Because
that helps to understand what their
agenda is. Why do they protect the
status quo? How do you connect the
business model, the profit-based motives
of the New York Times with its coverage?
Well, we've done studies of who's on the
New York Times corporate board,
and it interlocks with the most powerful
corporations,
healthc care industry, military
companies. That might explain why the
Times editorial position is not
progressive on those issues. So, uh, I
mean, I worked at MSNBC. I was on the
air at Fox News. I was on the air at
CNN. I saw things from the inside. There
are often good journalists, producers at
the bottom level. Some of them very
young. They went into journalism to, you
know, afflict the comfortable and
comfort the afflicted and to expose
power and illegitimate power and the
misuse of power. But they're working in
what I learned at MSNBC especially,
which is now called MS Now. These are
strict corporate hierarchies.
Like when I was at the Phil Donahghue
show
on prime time MSNBC,
I knew who my boss was. I knew who she
answered to, the head of MSNBC. I knew
who he answered to, which was the guy
who was placed into run NBC and NBC News
from General Electric, which owned the
whole thing. and he had come out of the
plastics division of General Electric.
So I mean in a short answer, Sali, why
do these corporate liberal outlets tilt
against labor, tilt against
environmentalism, tilt against
progressive change, tilt against
democratic socialists. It's because they
are part of big corporations. Um Jeff
Bezos owns the Washington Post. He's
right-wing. He's allied with Trump.
Ellison owns half the media. He's there
at the White House talking about who's
going to be fired at CNN after he takes
over Warner Brothers Discovery. But at
the New York Times and even public
broadcasting,
uh, look at their funding. Uh, in other
countries, public broadcasting is well
funded by the taxpayer and they don't
have to go running to big corporations
as sponsors, which they call
underwriters.
So, uh, I I mean, what we've done at
fair is we follow the money. And my
long- winded answer, Sali, uh, why do
corporate liberal or corporate centrist
outlets protect the status quo? A lot of
it is follow the money. These are
corporate institutions. These are
institutions that do not want to rock
the boat. I mean, and you know, if I can
talk about the good news.
Yes.
Always.
Yeah. I know that's what you're about,
Sali. The good news is
that there's a generation gap
that older people rely on legacy media,
including liberals, and they think that
they're getting liberal or neutral news
from the New York Times and public
broadcasting and TV news. And then you
have people under 40, under 45 who are
getting their news elsewhere.
During Gaza, they were getting a lot of
news from Tik Tok. That's why Ellison, a
a 110% Zionist, has moved to take over
the US operation of Tik Tok, the
billionaire from Oracle. So the good
news is that young people on and you
could go issue after issue are are
avoiding legacy media going to
independent media using their social
media and there's this generational gap
on what people believe and what people
want for the country like in New York I
was very active early supporter uh roots
action was the first national group to
announce its support of Zoran Mandani
for mayor. And in New York media, the
legacy media, the TV channels, the New
York Post, of course, owned by Rupert
Murdoch, right-wing, and the New York
Times were telling you why you should
fear Mandani.
And young people didn't buy it in spite
of, you know, huge amounts of money in
commercials and these news outlets
telling us why we should fear Mam
Donnie. people under 40, under 45
weren't even getting that news and they
overwhelmingly
not only voted for Manny but volunteered
for Manny by the thousands and
thousands. And the other issue is Gaza.
Uh I mean, young people are not hearing
CNN apologize for what Israel is doing
in Gaza. They're not hearing CNN and
others telling you that the anti-Israel,
the anti- genocide encampments
on campuses,
well, they're really sort of
anti-Semitic, aren't they? That's what
was said week after week on CNN. I mean,
my daughter was in the encampment
encampments, 100% Jewish, as were many
of the activists at the encampment. It
wasn't about anti-semitism. It was about
stopping genocide. And young people have
a very different view on Israel and what
Israel did in Gaza because they weren't
hearing all the apologies from
mainstream media uh allegedly corporate
liberal uh media. So, I mean, there's
good news and the good news is
independent news is growing. Is it can
it compete with corporate liberal media?
No. Is it anywhere close to the huge
corporate right-wing media? No. But it's
growing.
And I also should mention that fair has
its own radio show. You have a a
publication that you put out called
Extra. There's a lot of things to
explore. So let me close with asking you
Jeff, how can people get involved in
supporting Fair's work? And also, who
are FIR's natural allies in the social
justice landscape? Is it just other sort
of media organizations, watchdog
organizations? Do you ally yourselves
with social justice groups? um where
does it fit in and where can people link
up? I think fair sees itself
as allied with social justice movements
and fair has taught from the beginning
that if your main issue is racial
justice or police misconduct or
immigrants rights or opposing US empire
and militarism whatever your or labor or
feminism whatever your main issue is
your second issue should be dealing with
media bias and becoming media active.
So, uh I encourage people to go to
fair.org org.
um sign up to be uh at the upper right
email uh network and you'll see that no
matter what makes you listen to Sonali
or what motivates you to watch free
speech TV, whatever those issues are,
you should also have an issue that I've
got to be a media activist and not just
a racial justice activist or a peace
activist or an environmental activist or
a feminist activist. So that's I think
what fair has brought to the table is uh
to try to mobilize people to do those
three things. Be skeptical about
corporate media whether it's liberal or
right-wing
become media active. Challenge media
bias and exclusion. And then three do
everything you can to build independent
non-corporate media.
Well, Jeeoff, I want to thank you so
much for joining us today and really
appreciate your time. Fair.org is where
you can find out more about Fair's work.
Thanks so much.
Thank you, Sonali.
My guest has been Jeff Cohen. He's a
columnist, activist, former journalism
professor, and author of Cable News
Confidential, and he founded the media
watchdog group Fair in 1986. He's also
co-founder of rootsaction.org.
This is Rising Up for Justice and I'm
Sonali Kohhutkar, host and executive
producer of this new weekly halfhour
series exclusive to viewers of Free
Speech TV and subscribers of my
long-standing program rising
upwithonali. You can find out more at
rising upwith sonali.com
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