Rising Up For Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting

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FEATURING REEM SULEIMAN - Our nation and our world is 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, we’ll hear from organizers 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, our guest is Jeff Cohen, a columnist, activist, former journalism professor and author of "Cable News Confidential." He founded the media watch group FAIR in 1986 and co-founded RootsAction.org in 2011.

ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:

Sonali Kolhatkar: So you are here to talk about FAIR, which stands for Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting. It is a very valuable institution that I have relied on, whose work I've relied on over my couple of decades doing this. Tell me, and for our audience who aren't familiar with FAIR's work, what it is and what its main goals are. 

Jeff Cohen: FAIR 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. 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 goal of FAIR has always been to spur media activism against bias, against exclusion, against censorship, and against the corporate takeover of media.