Prisoners of their Bureaus--the Besieged Press of Baghdad What it's like to be a journalist in Iraq now--and especially relevant given the current attacks on the media for not reporting all the good that's happening in Iraq-- ... an ever-widening gulf between official language and the reality of the actual situation in Baghdad. While official language is relentlessly upbeat, the already nightmarish reality has been getting worse with each passing day. ... the insurgent attacks on the US forces and Iraqi government and the sectarian fighting between Sunnis and Shiites have become destructive beyond what most journalists have been able to convey ... (NY Review of Books)
posted by amberglow on Mar 25, 2006 - 35 comments

underreported.com :: Headlines for the rest of us
posted by anastasiav on Mar 18, 2005 - 12 comments

Video of Krugman on Media and Economics

If Bush said the earth is flat, of course Fox News would say "Yes, the earth is flat, and anyone who says different is unpatriotic." And mainstream media would have stories with the headline: "Shape of Earth: Views Differ; and would at most report that some Democrats say that it's round."

So said Paul Krugman during a recent interview in Boston with Chris Lydon, former host of NPR's 'The Connection.'
posted by ericrolph on Sep 22, 2003 - 28 comments

The dicey dynamics of exposing untruths. An interesting bit in the Columbia Journalism Review on why journalists tend to focus on politicians' small lies and let the big ones slide.
posted by gottabefunky on Sep 10, 2003 - 39 comments

Search the New York Times website for any occurrence of the words "Valerie Plame" during the last week ...and you'll find nada, zilch, zip. The so-called "paper of record" has remained totally mum on what may be one of the biggest scandals of the Bush administration yet. You can read about it at Newsday, CBS, Time, and The Nation, and it's been mentioned on NBC... but not a word from the New York Times (save for a reference to it last week by syndicated columnist Paul Krugman, and a wire service story today; neither of those pieces mentions Plame by name). The Times' news and editorial divisions are asleep at the switch on this story. Maybe the Jayson Blair scandal was a distraction from the deeper problem: a paper that is so concerned with being balanced and respectable, it refuses to cover any politically controversial stories. You can e-mail letters@nytimes.com to ask why the Valerie Plame news blackout. Or just click this link a few dozen times to send 'em a message.
posted by Artifice_Eternity on Jul 25, 2003 - 38 comments

Times Reporter Who Resigned Leaves Long Trail of Deception The New York Times runs a long article detailing its preliminary findings in the matter of Jayson Blair, The Times' young staff reporter who made up sources, facts, and anecdotes in potentially hundreds of stories. Does this investigation help the Times avoid permanent disgrace? Or does this just confirm what you've always thought about the Times? Slate magazine is attributing part of the problem to affirmative action (Blair is black). Is AA relevant here?
posted by hhc5 on May 10, 2003 - 39 comments

Superseding the mainstream media, or "quirky parasites"? Less of interest here than the IraqFilter context itself - which amounts to the question "Is blogging to Gulf II what TV was to Vietnam and cable was to Gulf I?" - is an established medium caught in the act of visibly sizing up this comer, this new kid on the block, this parvenu we know as "blogging." Is it a valid new medium of reportage, fit to take its place alongside print and broadcast? Or is it merely parasitic, interstitial, even marginal? Inquiring minds want to know. (Note O'Donnell's hedges and his final & bizarrely misplaced condescension: "Maybe Allbritton will start a trend - bloggers no longer dependent on the mainstream for their material." WTF?)
posted by adamgreenfield on Apr 1, 2003 - 12 comments

Not All Iraqis Dancing in the Streets. To watch the neutered embedded reporters, you would think that every Iraqi is overjoyed to see America in his or her country. But the reality seems to be quite different: "Why are you here in this country? Are you trying to take over? Are you going to take our country forever? Are the Israelis coming next? Are you here to steal our oil? When are you going to get out?"
posted by owillis on Mar 22, 2003 - 35 comments

2002 media follies. The most overhyped and underreported stories of the year.
posted by homunculus on Dec 31, 2002 - 33 comments

Jimmy Brelsin has been taking stabs at Catholic Church over the last two days (the bishops are abusing money this time). As one of the last true beat reporters in NYC, if not the nation, he's been writing for underdogs for over 40 years. Fairly well too.
posted by SimStupid on Oct 8, 2002 - 8 comments

some atrocious reporting from the usually responsible UK Guardian Just an example of bad conclusions from little information. The sensationalist title of this story, reprinted from the Observer, is, "Anthrax attacks' 'work of neo-Nazis,'" (which seems like bad grammar to boot - why the apostrophe after "attacks"?) and then it begins, "Neo-Nazi extremists within the US are behind the deadly wave of anthrax attacks against America, according to latest briefings from the security services and Justice Department."

But if you read the actual article, here's the closest thing they have to a quote or face supporting this:

'We've been zeroing in on a number of hate groups, especially one on the West Coast,' a source at the Justice Department told The Observer yesterday. 'We've certainly not discounted the possibility that they may be involved.'

Is it just me, or is this drawing a lot out of a little, and just confusing the situation?
posted by moth on Oct 29, 2001 - 20 comments

Is the NY Times ranking its stories by "popularity" as they say, or as this writer suggests, what's "interesting"?
posted by lowblow on Jun 6, 2001 - 3 comments