Posts under ‘Media Criticism’

UPDATED It’s hardly surprising when someone fires back at a harsh critic of his or her employer’s competence and/or ethics. But when that someone is superstar New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman, and the return fire takes the form, in part, of “Fuck you,” it raises a few eyebrows — and makes you wonder […]

Accompanying Simon Johnson’s remarkable, must-read Atlantic article, “The Quiet Coup,” is this chart: What’s not noted here — or in most traditional media coverage of the meltdown — is something that everyone should understand. These profits were an illusion in the end. They existed just long enough, purely on paper but not in any long-term […]

My friend and colleague Tim McGuire says, “Bloodless journalism and mindless stats are not the way to report this recession”.

Capitol Alert: Eleven papers run A-1 editorial blasting lawmakers, Schwarzenegger.In a rare move, at least 11 California newspapers ran a front-page editorial on Sunday blasting the Legislature and governor for failing to solve the state’s budget woes. “The once great state of California today becomes a national disgrace,” the editorial began. The editorial ran in […]

Michael Goldfarb, a web editor for the right-wing Weekly Standard, was a blogger on the McCain campaign last fall. In a Q & A with CJR, he says, among other things, that he was told his role would be to “attack the press” in the blog: And that struck me as a really bad idea, […]

Here’s a piece I wrote for Talking Points Memo on a subject I’ve covered here before. It begins: Our government’s current operating principle seems to be bailing out people who were culpable in the financial meltdown. If so, journalists are surely entitled to billions of dollars. Why? Journalists were grossly deficient when it came to […]

From the Los Angeles Times: Rosa Brooks’ Dec. 11 column described Gov. Rod R. Blagojevich as “newly indicted.” He has only been charged in a federal corruption case. Huh?

Gene Koo: Obama’s non-reductive rhetoric. The technology to bypass top-down media is one cornerstone of Obama’s success as a communicator. His nonreductive rhetoric is another.

This is the kind of thing that makes me crazy. The Washington Post runs an interesting story — Obama’s $100,000-Plus Donors Were Able to Give to Several Entities — about “nearly 100” wealthy families who’ve been giving big bucks to Obama. The story is based on data the paper crunched itself. But the article names […]

Glenn Greenwald (Salon): Establishment Washington unifies against prosecutions. As confirmed accounts emerged years ago of chronic presidential lawbreaking, warrantless eavesdropping, systematic torture, rendition, “black site” prisons, corruption in every realm, and all sorts of other dark crimes, where were journalists and other opinion-making elites? Very few of them with any significant platform can point to […]