Announcing MediaFAIL: Find It, Post It, Fail It
Posted May 18th, 2010 by Josh Levy
You know it; your friends know it; everyone knows it: The media are failing.
That’s why today, after a couple of months of beta testing, we’re officially launching an exciting new project: MediaFAIL, a site that lets you expose the worst moments in the media as they happen.
The point behind the site is simple. Every day, we read and watch reporting that favors sensation over substance. Sideshows dominate the news cycle, while real issues of public concern get drowned out by the noise. What passes for news is too often badly sourced and tainted by commercial interests or political bias.
Here’s a sampling of what’s appeared on the site in the last day:
- Fox News host Brit Hume tried to minimize the impact of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, to the surprise of everyone on his show.
- The Second City comedy troupe lays into the Discovery Channel for launching a show called “Sarah Palin’s Alaska.”
- Men’s Health just advised that the best colleges for men are those where feminism is weakest.
These outrageous MediaFAILs are all featured on the new site. You can go there to vote on these or other fails, share them on Facebook and Twitter, or submit your own.
The goal of MediaFAIL isn’t just to give the media a failing grade — we want to make it better. That’s why we’ll be connecting featured “fails” to important media reform campaigns by Free Press and our allies, like Defenders of Wildlife’s campaign to get the Discovery Channel to drop Sarah Palin’s show about Alaska.
This is just the beginning. We’ll be adding some big new features soon. In the meantime, submit a FAIL now!
