The McClatchy Washington bureau series, Guantanamo: Beyond the Law, puts to shame almost all the other reporting by other news organizations. It’s falling through the cracks, because of the NIH syndrome in journalism — institutional unwillingness to talk about other journalists’ great work and what they’ve reported.
One other paper has noticed. The Boston Phoenix asks, Is anybody paying attention to McClatchy’s powerful Guantánamo exposé?
Apparently, no. Another example of Washington journalism at work, or not at work.
on Jun 29th, 2008 at 8:12 pm
Thanks for the link. But I’d hate to think this was beyond remedy.
Compare its reception to the Physician for Human Rights 140-page report “Broken Laws, “Broken Lives” series released the same week.
I suppose that it’s easier to promote an “independent” report as a singular piece of work than a a newspaper series. I suppose also that this was more a depth piece than a scoop piece, other newsrooms didn’t pay as much attention.
Bear in mind that the NYT created the “Opinionator” blog to echo what’s what’s discussed in the opinion-o-sphere, and not the fact-o-sphere. And Slate’s popular amplifier “Today’s Papers” still focuses on the “Big Five” daily papers, and doesn’t tend to look beyond them, and it certainly didn’t for the week of June 15-19th for the series.
I assume you have some pipeline into working newsrooms (more than I do), and might come up with some better answers. Most of the editors who make these decisions are outside
on Jul 1st, 2008 at 1:45 pm
[…] just saw Dan Gillmor’s post from a few days ago about McClatchy doing real journalism on Guantanamo and getting ignored: […]
on Jul 2nd, 2008 at 10:01 am
Jon, very good point, and I’m working on something about this.