This WP commentary discusses a new Harvard study says the conservative editorial pages are more intensely partisan, and far less willing to criticize a Republican administration than the liberal pages are to take on a Democratic administration.
Of course a liberal reporter did the study, but Mr Kurtz of the WP thinks his findings are well-balanced. I'm liberal, too, so I've got my biases, but I've felt this way for a while. I mean where's the liberal equivalent of Rush Limbaugh, Andrew Sullivan, Bill O'Reilly, or Anne Coulter? People full of vindictiveness, name-calling, and outright hatred and condemnation?
posted by Red58
on Aug 5, 2003 -
43 comments
Why Do Gays Smoke So Much? Yet another escape from the cruel shackles of responsibility. Why do Gays smoke? 1. They have no children. 2. Social Opprobrium. 3. People are mean.
This isn't journalism. It's crap. High risk behaviors tend to promote other high risk behaviors, like the tattoos-sex-cigaretts connection. It could be something even more sinister, like the values of particular subcultures.
How can we get people to take more responsibility for self destructive behavior? Cigarettes, fat, alcohol, unsafe sex... if we are ever forced into National Health Care, there will be no reason to deny ourselves anything. Have another cigarette on me.
posted by ewkpates
on Aug 5, 2003 -
61 comments
Dalai Llama Misses Sex, Shoots Guns This is the finest tabloid newspaper headline
evar. Remember Peter Falk, in Tom Wolfe's
Bonfire of the Vanities, admiring the rhythmic and sadistic anticlimax of the headline: 'Scalp Grandma, then rob her' ? This is better.
Should I have worked on the school paper instead of playing bass? I could have been a contender.
via fark.
posted by crunchburger
on Aug 2, 2003 -
16 comments
Unbiased (ideally) but not inhuman (hopefully) The Dart Center for Journalism & Trauma at the University of Washington studies the effects of crazy badness ("if it bleeds, it leads") on reporters and studies ways in which the news media can better cover traumatic events in the life of the world: War, Famine, Pestilence, and Death. From a piece on the site, "9-11 Journalists Share Memories, Support," "Long before Sept. 11, he was interested in how journalists respond to the pain and misery they encounter in their work, and the lack of support they often find in a traditionally tough-minded business. Then he nearly died while photographing the World Trade Center attack, and found those issues hit closer to home than he ever imagined."
posted by jengod
on Jul 23, 2003 -
2 comments
GOP Warns TV Stations Not to Air Ad Alleging Bush Mislead the Nation Over Iraq They claim that the
ad itself is dishonest, and cite the obligation of broadcast outlets to be free of misleading information. “
Such obligations must be taken seriously. This letter puts you on notice that the information contained in the above-cited advertisement is false and misleading; therefore, you are obligated to refrain from airing this advertisement.” Despite the implicit threats,
only one station has refused to run the ad, a Fox station.
posted by Ignatius J. Reilly
on Jul 23, 2003 -
74 comments
Turning the tanks on the reporters The Observer's Phillip Knightley writes that
Iraq will go down as the war when journalists seemed to become a target. Predicted
here, discussed "in progress"
here.
The BBC, Al-Jazeera, and the US Committee to Protect Journalists thought it prudent to find out from the Pentagon what steps they could take to protect their correspondents if war came to Iraq... All three organisations concluded that the Pentagon was determined to deter western correspondents from reporting any war from the 'enemy' side; would view such journalism in Iraq as activity of 'military significance', and might well bomb the area.
posted by Ignatius J. Reilly
on Jun 15, 2003 -
25 comments
Elliott could no longer bear the waste. He had six staff and a budget of £3.5m a year. He had a potential client group of 25,000 users ... but at the end of all his work and all that public money, the total number of detox beds he was able to provide was five. The Guardian reports from the front-line of the drugs war. (
part two) You may have no interest in Drugs or the UK but read this superb piece for a profile of a bureaucracy in farcical, tragic, total collapse.
posted by grahamwell
on May 23, 2003 -
5 comments
To Tell the Truth: Writer Sarah Hepola describes a night drinking beers with disgraced
Times reporter Jayson Blair and her own muddy relationship with the truth. "I’ve been trying to stay outside the gray areas these days. I’m trying to tell the truth, in all its raggedness. But I slip up sometimes. I duck the straight and narrow. As I read over what I have written here, I wonder: Have I lied to you yet? Would I even know?"
posted by junkbox
on May 16, 2003 -
28 comments
I just read an article about a
one-man off-Broadway play based on the war reporting of Ernie Pyle. Meanwhile, the
IU School of Journalism is reprinting three dozen of his dispatches. It is interesting that Pyle, perhaps the original embedded reporter managed to
report honestly about the horrors of war in spite of perhaps a more sweeping censorship department that read everything coming from the front. Pyle's
description of Normandy (previously discussed) is a classic contrasting a beautiful day on the beach, the human and material wreckage, and even empathy for German prisoners of war. And then there was
some black humor of surviving near misses that could have come out of
Catch 22 or
Slaugherhouse 5. His unfinished final dispatch reads like poetry:
"Dead men by mass production--in one country after another--month after month and year after year. Dead men in winter and dead men in summer.
"Dead men in such familiar promiscuity that they become monotonous.
"Dead men in such monstrous infinity that you come almost to hate them."
posted by KirkJobSluder
on May 6, 2003 -
8 comments
Iranian blogger arrested Sina Motallebi, well-known blogger and journalist was arrested this morning. He is accused of threatening the national security by giving interviews to Persian language radios outside Iran, wrtiting articles both in newspapers and his weblog. His weblog, WebGard (i.e. web surfer), was among the top 5 Persian most popular weblogs while his wife, Farnaz, has her own weblog, mostly writing about their newly-born baby boy, Mani. [via
jj]
posted by dagny
on Apr 20, 2003 -
12 comments
BBC News reporters' weblog on the war is closed. It was a great example of how the idea of weblog can be used in mainstream media. (Although it lacked hyper-links) In it's last instalment, reporters record some final impressions and look back at what it was like reporting the war. The daily archives are available on the right column of the page.
posted by hoder
on Apr 18, 2003 -
3 comments
Arafat on our side? Other than this story (Guardian), I haven't seen much coverage of Yasser Arafat's behind the scenes efforts to protect Western journalists in Iraq. Possibly not the act of the evil man that he's often portrayed as?
posted by daveg
on Apr 3, 2003 -
37 comments
This lengthy Los Angeles Times photo correction addresses the manipulation of a front page photo and the subsequent firing of its photographer. Working from two source photos, Brian Walski combined them in Photoshop to create a more compelling image, but was caught when someone noticed that some people appeared twice in the background of the modified photo. (via
Fimoculous and
others)
posted by waxpancake
on Apr 2, 2003 -
34 comments
Celebrity TV journalist Geraldo Rivera kicked out of Iraq: Pentagon I had seen Geraldo drawing the map referred to. Geraldo was not "embedded" and therefore acting as a real reporter. Did he give away key info? My suspicion is No. I had earlier seen retired officers (they all retire and then go on TV) make similar marking to show where our forces were on the way toward Baghdad. I knew in advance where Geraldo would conclude his map in the sand because I had seen it on the "embedded" reports on various cable stations.
posted by Postroad
on Mar 31, 2003 -
29 comments
A journalist with principles When Katy Weitz, an anti-war feature writer for UK paper 'The Sun' picked up Thursday's edition and saw the headline, it was a step too far. She went in the following day and without another job to go to, handed in her resignation. It was no longer possible for her to write for a paper whose views she didn't agree with. I once gave up a marketing job because it ran against my principles as well. How far can we stretch ourselves before we have to shrug our shoulders and say ... it's only a job?
posted by feelinglistless
on Mar 31, 2003 -
16 comments
"Now America is reappraising the battlefield, delaying the war, maybe a week and rewriting the war plan. The first plan has failed because of Iraqi resistance. Now they are trying to write another plan." Seems patently obvious, no? But tell Iraqi state television that and suddenly you're speaking from "a position of complete ignorance," according to the White House.
Peter Arnett,
highly respected, Pulitzer Prize winner and the first journalist to
interview Osama Bin Laden on film, wouldn't back down the
last time a network caved into craven submission at hands of the American military, and
he's been sacked by NBC/MSNBC for again refusing to do so. There's no First Amendment case, obviously, and no real surprise that the military would be exerting pressure to maintain control over information, but does the firing of high-profile Arnett for the repeating the obvious increase
anybody's confidence that we're hearing anything resembling the truth?
posted by JollyWanker
on Mar 31, 2003 -
30 comments
Fox News "revises" its own news scroll during New York war protest. "The news ticker rimming Fox's headquarters on Sixth Avenue wasn't carrying war updates as the protest began. Instead, it poked fun at the demonstrators, chiding them.
'War protester auditions here today ... thanks for coming!' read one message. 'Who won your right to show up here today?' another questioned. 'Protesters or soldiers?' Said a third: 'How do you keep a war protester in suspense? Ignore them....' Still another read: 'Attention protesters: the Michael Moore Fan Club meets Thursday at a phone booth at Sixth Avenue and 50th Street.'" Fox claims the network "didn't mean to insult anyone."
posted by XQUZYPHYR
on Mar 29, 2003 -
95 comments
"Journalists" vs. The White House - MSNBC's Tom Curry reports on the Bush administration's frustration with the war coverage. Rumsfeld: “Fortunately... the American people have a very good center of gravity and can absorb and balance what they see and hear.”
posted by cinematique
on Mar 28, 2003 -
9 comments
This whole damn battlefield is entirely screwed up. Journalists are informants are medics are soldiers are noncombatants are enemies are friends are puppets are war criminals are spies are civilians are terrorists are injured are paramilitary are POWs are freedom fighters are MIA are bloggers are bystanders are children are involved. Will there ever again be an American war where it's clear who's who? And who's on which side?
posted by jengod
on Mar 28, 2003 -
15 comments
Robert Fisk in the Independent Today's front page of the UK broadsheet comprises solely of a text-only report of yesterday's bombing of a Baghdad marketplace, beginning: "It was an outrage, an obscenity. The severed hand on the metal door, the swamp of blood and mud across the road, the human brains inside a garage, the incinerated, skeletal remains of an Iraqi mother and her three small children in their still-smouldering car..."
This is how war reporting should be.
posted by garyh
on Mar 27, 2003 -
110 comments
Embedded? Or In Bed With The Military Spin Doctors? Quite apart from the significant sexual and conspiratorial overtones of the word and concept themselves (when applied to people), there's something more than a little disquieting about the
participant observation aspect of the large-scale practice of
embedded reporting in the current invasion of Iraq - as opposed to the journalistic tradition of direct observation. Altogether too gung-ho - and inevitably so - I'd say. Me no like. And don't really trust myself to be able to epistemologically introduce, in my understanding of what I see, the (already minimal) distance that I'd previously taken for granted in standard reportage. What can be done to offset this bias? [
Here is a very recent, detailed Department of Defense guide to what a media embed consists of [pdf format] and the release journalists must sign in order to be embedded.]
posted by MiguelCardoso
on Mar 22, 2003 -
23 comments
The Los Angeles Times goes multimedia. For the past few weeks, the LA Times has begun a significant push into offering video, audio, and interactive Flash on their website. One of the most interesting aspects is that the paper has moved one step beyond simply replaying AP Television clips as many sites have done; the LA Times writers are stand before the cameras and microphones themselves and report stories in a stuttering, non-hairsprayed, introverted demeanor that I find very refreshing, though so far I have gleaned very little additional information from it. When does (or can) this mode of journalism on the web rise above gimmickry or 'just because we can' and add value to a written article? Can video/tv news rise above mere spectacle?
posted by 4easypayments
on Mar 20, 2003 -
3 comments
The idea of weblogs has defenitely inspired BBC Online news for making the following pages:
posted by hoder
on Mar 20, 2003 -
4 comments
The War is about to Start and for those of us without a TV we are part of a grand experiment to see if we can be as well informed. According to
this Reuters article, Radio had World War II, Television had Vietnam, Cable TV had the Gulf War and now, the Internet may have the U.S. war with Iraq...reporters and producers with wireless laptops and handheld digital cameras will
file reports from battlefields and military installations. Cameras are at key locations for live feeds 24 hours a day. Interactive, 3-D maps will update troop movements, casualties and weapons used. ''You're combining the speed of television with the depth of print,'' says Mitch Gelman, executive producer of CNN.com. ''This could define how future wars are covered.'' (more inside)
posted by stbalbach
on Mar 19, 2003 -
19 comments
The return of the Movietone? "We fell on this idea of recreating films that looked like and were the length of the old Movietone forms of the 1940s," said Marine Lt. Col. Jim Kuhn, military producer for the undertaking called the Movietone Newsreel Project. Kuhn says the objective is to put together a short film that combines the commentary of real-life soldiers with the kind of footage civilian journalists would be unable to get. (more inside)
posted by damn yankee
on Mar 13, 2003 -
6 comments
Pentagon threatens to target journalists in Iraq. (RealAudio, 49 minutes into the broadcast.)
In an interview with Radio One Ireland,
Kate Adie, former chief news correspondent for the BBC, drops a bombshell.
If satellite uplinks from the press are detected in Baghdad, they would be "targeted down", said a senior US military official. "They know this. They've been warned."
Ms. Adie also revealed that the US military are openly asking journalists what their feelings are on the war, and are using this information to block reporters from access to reporting on the conflict.
These actions are "shameless" and "entirely hostile to the free spread of information," says Ms. Adie. "What actually appalls me is the difference between twelve years ago and now. I've seen a complete erosion of any kind of acknowledgment that reporters should be able to report as they witness."
posted by insomnia_lj
on Mar 12, 2003 -
74 comments
Justice for Consumers "The owners of the KaZaA file-sharing network are suing the movie and recording industries, claiming that they don't understand the digital age and are monopolizing entertainment." Quote from article by Associated Press. I don't about you but I'm sick and tired of big businesses writing all the new laws in this country. Now maybe the people can get some justice for a change.
posted by tljenson
on Jan 28, 2003 -
21 comments
Is the BBCi website far too big and monopolistic? Editorial from 'The Guardian' discussing whether the BBC's website, funded by the British license fee is taking the thunder away from commercial websites worldwide trying to achieve the same results in advertising run market place. There is some logic to the argument -- when e-marketing revenues are dwingling how can some sites compete with this bohemoth? On the other hand, if they were achieving the same results people would be going to them instead, and the BBC's website is very, very good in some places, indispensible in others.
posted by feelinglistless
on Jan 6, 2003 -
23 comments
2002: The Year in Pictures - as collected by
Reuters,
UPI,
Yahoo [Flash],
MSNBC [Flash],
CBS,
Newsweek,
Time Asia,
BET [Flash],
BBC UK,
BBC World,
Guardian UK,
Corbis News,
Corbis Features,
Corbis Entertainment, and
Corbis sports. You didn't have anything else to do today, now did you?
posted by kokogiak
on Dec 23, 2002 -
7 comments
Washington salutes its new Blog Overlords When Trent Lott finally fell from (g)race last friday, the ensuing
MeFi thread discussed how Lott's statements were at first a sleeper in the mainstream media but that the blogosphere forced the story onto the front pages. However, this theory was met with
some scepticism
However, the theory of blog ascendancy has legs. In fact, the story is
all over the place this morning.
With this level of discussion, right or wrong, Blogs just arguably went mainstream. (It might also be the end of our golden era of blogging.)
There are greater and lesser blogs. Its hard to tell which blog deserves the credit for toppling Lott. How will they determine the alpha blog? The winner could be the next "Drudge".
posted by BentPenguin
on Dec 23, 2002 -
43 comments
