Newspaper Profits Win Out Over Racial Progress
Reporting on last week’s closure of the 150-year-old Denver Rocky Mountain News, Juan Gonzalez and Amy Goodman (Democracy Now!, 2/27/09) give us the financial backstory behind the fact that “the...
View ArticleOn Journalism’s ‘Long Line’ of ‘Everyday Extremists’
Reading Mark Landler’s and Elizabeth Bumiller’s New York Times “tidbit out of an overheated Washington last week: ‘President Obama and his top advisers have been meeting almost daily to discuss...
View ArticleNYT on WikiLeaks: Move Along, No Atrocity to See Here
(UPDATE: Today’s Times includes a story about the WikiLeaks Iraq cable, under the somewhat strange headline “Cable Implicates Americans in Deaths of Iraqi Civilians.” Still very little in the rest of...
View ArticlePentagon Budgets and Fuzzy Math
By the tone of some of the media coverage, you might have thought Defense Secretary Leon Panetta announced a plan to slash military spending yesterday. On the front page of USA Today (1/27/12), under...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Syria and the ‘Red Line’ Nonsense
cc photo: Michael Lusk Late last week came news that the some U.S. intelligence believes, with low to moderate confidence, that chemical weapons–possibly sarin–was used in Syria. There were, as Jim...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Did Obama’s Speech Really ‘Narrow’ the War?
If you followed the coverage of President Barack Obama’s May 23 speech at the National Defense University, you would think something big happened to the “war on terror.” Specifically, its scope was...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Syria and Sarin: Skepticism Still Warranted
David Gregory (cc photo: CSIS) At the top of Sunday’s Meet the Press (6/16/13), host David Gregory declared, “Confirmation this week that chemical weapons were used.” That’s the kind of language...
View ArticleClik here to view.
John Kerry’s Very Precise Death Toll: Where Does It Come From?
When the PBS NewsHour covered John Kerry’s dramatic presentation on the alleged chemical weapons attack in Syria on August 21, reporter Jeffrey Brown (8/30/13) zeroed in on the death toll: KERRY: The...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Drones, the Media and Malala’s Message
Pakistani teenager Malala Yousafzai’s visit to the United States was widely covered in the media, including interviews with ABC‘s Diane Sawyer (10/11/13), CNN’s Christiane Amanpour (10/14/13) and Jon...
View ArticleClik here to view.
A New Turn in the War on Whistleblowers & Journalism?
If Director of National Intelligence James Clapper thinks you need to know about US intelligence, he’ll tell you. A remarkable bit of news was made this week by Steven Aftergood of the Federation of...
View ArticleClik here to view.
We Could Keep Government Small if Only the Old Weren’t Getting So Much...
McClatchy‘s Kevin G. Hall (2/2/15) wants to drop some (conventional) wisdom on you: Few things defy gravity more than federal spending. In the nation’s capital, what goes up does not come down. It...
View Article