Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR)

Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR) is a progressive national media watch group that monitors mainstream U.S. media for inaccuracy, bias, and censorship, and advocates for greater diversity. FAIR's analysis is founded on a belief that corporate ownership and sponsorship, as well as government policies and pressures, restrict journalism and thereby restrict public discourse. FAIR argues that structural reform is essential to promote effective, independent journalism; the group advocates breaking up media conglomerates, establishing truly independent public broadcasting, and promoting strong nonprofit sources of information.

FAIR works with both activists and journalists to achieve its goals. It publishes Extra!, a bimonthly magazine of media criticism, and produces the syndicated weekly radio program CounterSpin, which features interviews with journalists, scholars, and activists on topical media-related stories. FAIR also maintains a website, http://Fair.org, which provides daily commentary on news coverage and houses extensive back archives of FAIR's media criticism. The group encourages activism through its e-mail list, which alerts readers to incidents of inaccuracy or bias in the news, and provides analysis and news outlet contact information for readers to communicate directly with journalists.

Jeff Cohen and Martin A. Lee founded FAIR in 1986, in the face of increasing consolidation of media outlets and the rising prominence of well-financed, right-wing media criticism. FAIR pioneered quantitative media bias studies that analyze the guest lists of television news programs. While conservative media critics claimed that media skewed left—based on polls of journalists' voting patterns—FAIR argued that in journalism as it is practiced today, it is news sources, not journalists, who voice opinions and therefore serve as a more accurate gauge of media bias. FAIR's source studies have consistently shown that mainstream media heavily favor corporate and government elites and marginalize minority, female, public interest, and dissenting viewpoints.

As an anti-censorship and pro-diversity group, FAIR encourages the inclusion of new and different voices, rather than the silencing of old voices or those with which it disagrees. FAIR also points out in its critiques that balance is not the same as objectivity, arguing that in their painstaking efforts to appear not to be taking sides, media often create a false balance that skews reality.

FAIR points out that the First Amendment gives the press special protection in the Constitution precisely so that it can keep the government in check and accountable to the public. But in a corporate media environment that pressures the so-called Fourth Estate to not challenge official claims or the status quo, groups such as FAIR have an important place to keep watch over the watchers.