Posts under ‘Ethics’

Washington Post: NBC newsmagazine paid pedophile watchdog group to run sting. The NBC newsmagazine “Dateline” agreed to pay a civilian watchdog group more than $100,000 to create a pedophile sting operation that the network plans to feature in a series of programs next month, network representatives and the organization’s founder said. People at NBC and […]

Center for Media and Democracy: Fake TV News: Widespread and Undisclosed. Over a ten-month period, the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) documented television newsrooms’ use of 36 video news releases (VNRs)—a small sample of the thousands produced each year. CMD identified 77 television stations, from those in the largest to the smallest markets, that […]

In “Think Tanks for Sale,” Slate’s Timothy Noah exclaims: Among the many revelations of the scandal surrounding the Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff is the remarkable degree to which the capital’s think tank “scholars” can be bought. It’s absolutely true. The sleaze Noah documents so well in this posting is well worth a look (and, I […]

Rebecca MacKinnon: Yahoo! Abomination.: Yahoo! executives keep framing this issue as black and white: Either you’re in there and do everything the Chinese authorities tell you without question, or you can’t do business in China at all. That is false. Companies can and do make choices. You can engage in China and choose not to […]

Salon: Washington Post on Domenech: “We did plenty of background checks”. Jim Brady, executive editor of Washingtonpost.com, told Salon Friday that Post editors had thoroughly vetted young right-wing blogger Ben Domenech before they hired him to write for the site. He said editors saw no “red flags” that Domenech was a plagiarist. Domenech resigned from […]

The fists haven’t stopped flying over the Huffington Post’s bad move in reprinting George Clooney’s statements in other venues as blog postings, and Arianna Huffington’s mea culpa is not placating the critics. The more I learn about what happened, the more I agree that this was an egregiously bad move on her part. It all […]

Arianna Huffington: Lesson Learned. At the beginning of the week, I was so focused on making it crystal clear that we did indeed have permission to run the Clooney blog that I was blinded to another extremely important issue: that a blog, where the source of the material is not clear, diminishes the amazing work […]

UPDATED NY Times: Wal-Mart Enlists Bloggers in Its Public Relations Campaign. Under assault as never before, Wal-Mart is increasingly looking beyond the mainstream media and working directly with bloggers, feeding them exclusive nuggets of news, suggesting topics for postings and even inviting them to visit its corporate headquarters. But the strategy raises questions about what […]

New West Network: Denver Media Offering Politicos Free PR Outlet. In south metro communities, at least, several politicians — including the House Minority Leader and a couple of wannabes who hope to be ensconced in the Colorado Capitol after next fall’s election — have discovered that they can post whatever they like in “news stories” […]

Washington Post Op-Ed columnist Colbert I. King raises a question that more and more people – readers and journalists alike – seem to be asking: who decides what’s newsworthy today? Interestingly, King came to address this issue thanks to feedback from a Post reader who wrote to the editor after the murder of Marion Fye, […]