Jeff Cohen is a journalist, media critic, and the founder of Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR), a media watchdog group in the US. He was formerly a lawyer for the ACLU and authored or co-authored five books that criticize media bias, mainly written with Norman Solomon. He was a regular commentator for Fox News Channel's Fox News Watch, for MSNBC and CNN, and appears in Outfoxed, a documentary critical of Fox News.
Cohen grew up in Detroit and did undergraduate study at the University of Michigan. He studied law at the People's Law School in Los Angeles and was admitted to the California Bar in 1981. He worked as a journalist in the L.A. area and after law school was a lawyer for the ACLU. Cohen founded FAIR in 1986 and subsequently served as executive director and on the board of directors. In 2002 Cohen left FAIR to work full-time for MSNBC as senior producer of Phil Donahue's show, Donahue. Previously, he briefly co-hosted CNN's Crossfire in 1996 and was a regular panelist on FNC's Fox News Watch from 1997 to 2002. In 2008, Cohen became the founding director of the Park Center for Independent Media at the Roy H. Park School of Communications at Ithaca College where he is an associate professor in the journalism department.