Posts under ‘Issues’

The Smithsonian Institution is a museum complex that has been called our national attic, and it is one of the great treasures of American history and life. But in an outrageous deal with a private media company, the Smithsonian has moved down a path that would privatize a vital part of our national cultural commons. […]

Bertrand Pecquerie, in a guess blog posting on CBSNews.com (I’m doing one later this week), sums up: In the U.S., people blog but they don’t vote. Virtual democracy doesn’t seem to have any affect on real democracy. In Europe, we vote (last week’s elections in Italy, for instance, had an 83% voter turnout), but we […]

In his Talk to the Newsroom, a useful but extremely limited version of transparency at the New York Times, Executive Editor Bill Keller inadvertently reveals a common failing among today’s journalists when he writes: Perhaps it’s a reporter’s curse, but I seemed to have a gift for seeing both sides of almost every issue. It’s […]

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 […]

Washington Post: Internet Firms Want FCC to Enforce Net Neutrality. Internet companies yesterday criticized legislation that would give the Federal Communications Commission only limited ability to stop phone and cable companies from blocking access to Web sites, saying the proposal would endanger the open nature of the Web. The bill, championed by House Commerce Committee […]

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 […]