Because the media are owned by giant corporations like General Electric, says FAIR, its news has a pro-business edge.

If the media are actually biased against leftism, then that contradicts what most Americans perceive. According to a survey by the Center for Media and Public Affairs, 43 percent of Americans see the media as being “liberal” while 18 percent believe them to be conservative. (33 percent saw the media as “moderate” and 5 percent didn’t have an opinion.)

Nevertheless, FAIR has long despised the brilliant ABC News reporter John Stossel for giving reports that argued against the anti-capitalist bias entrenched in the media -- and years before Fox News balanced the scale somewhat.

In FAIR’s estimate, Stossel isn’t in the minority, but is only the most blatant among thousands of reporters who are apparently shills for corporate America. Accordingly, FAIR tries to smear his reputation and get him fired.

FAIR’s other blind spots: It ignores the anti-capitalist preaching on the PBS program “Frontline,” as it sees even PBS as a pro-corporate apparatchik. It regards CNN in the same light. But, of course, Stossel is supposedly the most egregious example of pro-capitalist cheerleading.

Yet the real question is whether FAIR itself really does stand for “fairness and accuracy in reporting” -- literally; not just nominally. Is FAIR non-partisan?

If so, then why is it endorsed almost exclusively by organizations that identify themselves as “progressive”? “Progressive,” after all, is a euphemism for “socialist,” and Dictionary.com classifies it as a synonym for “liberal.”

All of the following self-described “progressive” organizations promote FAIR’s work: “Z Magazine,” "The Nation" magazine (which endorsed Soviet communism in the early 20th century), and the Progressive Student Alliance.

More significantly, both the self-identified “progressive” Students for Social Change and Washington County Progressive Coalition themselves “compliment” FAIR as “progressive.”

If FAIR is unbiased, then why does the Columbia Journalism Review call it a “liberal watchdog group” (emphasis added)? And this same description of FAIR also comes from the Socialist Party's “Socialism Today” magazine and the mostly-leftist Salon.com, which was co-founded by a former employee of the anti-business advocacy magazine “Mother Jones.”

From all this, it looks like we can come to a few possible conclusions.

Maybe FAIR really is "fair and accurate," because only an extremely “progressive” outlook is correct. Or could it be that FAIR has an anti-capitalist agenda to begin with, and that it narrow-mindedly dismisses any new bit of information as a lie if it doesn't fit into this leftist paradigm?

Even FAIR itself indirectly admits to having its own partisan agenda. Its Web page states, "As a progressive group, FAIR believes that structural reform is ultimately needed to break up the dominant media conglomerates, establish independent public broadcasting and promote strong non-profit sources of information" (emphasis added).

There you have it. FAIR describes itself as "progressive," and it wants to replace the "media conglomerates" with "independent public broadcasting." Translation: This organization resents how other people earn profits by providing others with information about the world’s events. FAIR wants to eradicate that.

So who is FAIR [sic] trying to fool in presenting itself as an objective news source? It's a propaganda machine, plainly and simply.

Incidentally, one of FAIR’s greatest contributors is MIT linguist Noam Chomsky -- both in terms of monetary donations and the many articles of his published in its magazine “Extra!”

Those who trust Chomsky ought to know that he’s an apologist for the Cambodian dictator Pol Pot and his army, the Khmer Rouge. Chomsky declares that the executions performed by this Nazi-like group “numbered at most in the thousands,” when it really killed 2 million people.

Furthermore, Werner Cohn, a University of British Columbia sociologist, even claims to have discovered that the Israel-hating Chomsky, though himself Jewish, knowingly submits his books for publication to French organizations that try to deny that the Holocaust really happened. You can read about this at: http://www.frontpagemag.com/guestcolumnists/cohn09-11-01.htm

Chomsky replies that he doesn’t agree with this historical revisionism.

But why make friends with Holocaust-deniers at all? Predictably, he charges that it’s the Americans who “rob, exploit, and dominate.”

Whey does FAIR [sic] (Fairness [sic] and Accuracy [sic] In Reporting) associate with this man?

Let’s get this straight. FAIR [sic] chastises John Stossel for expressing what it perceives to be a distorted worldview, but not Chomsky.

How fair is that?

Stuart K. Hayashi is the president of the Reason Club of Honolulu and an undergraduate in Entrepreneurial Studies at Hawaii Pacific University, though his opinions do not necessarily reflect that of either institution. He can be reached at radical_individualist@hotmail.com

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