Posts under ‘Media Criticism’

I’ve just read the galleys of a book that will be published in a few weeks. It discusses the rise of edge-in, democratized media in distinctly unflattering ways. That, of course, is the author’s privilege. But is it his right to misrepresent reality to “prove” his point? The part of the book about which I […]

Talking News Biz: Raising the Buffett/Loomis question again. Loomis, who received the lifetime achievement award last year from the Society of American Business Editors and Writers, is writing about information disclosed in an annual report that she edited. Carmine Tiso, senior manager of communications for Fortune, told me in an e-mail, “Yes, Carol did edit […]

Robert Niles, asking rhetorically if blogs are a ‘parasitic’ medium, calls such charges poorly informed insult of many hard-working Web publishers who are doing fresh, informative and original work. And by dismissing blogs as “parasitic,” newspaper journalists make themselves blind to the opportunities that blogging, as well as independent Web publishing in general, offer to […]

Slate’s Jack Shafer tries to unravel “The BALCO mess or travels in the gray areas of confidential source arrangement,” and writes of the San Francisco Chronicle reporters whose source for grand-jury minutes turned out to be a defense attorney: Having found their leaker, the feds dropped the subpoena against the reporters. But a number of […]

The online magazine spiked has a story entitled “Is Wikipedia part of a new ‘global brain’?” in which a writer asks some reasonable questions but then undermines herself with — at best — incomplete reporting. She writes, in part: Much was made of a study conducted by Nature magazine at the end of 2005, which […]

Chicago Reader: The Public Sentiment Machine. Not long ago a letter to the editor required three things: time, an idea, and the ability to put it into words. All three impediments have been swept away. Once American bedrock, today a letter to the editor is often a chunk of computer-generated boilerplate. This practice indicts almost […]

The PBS Frontline series starts in most places tonight. It looks extraordinary.

In a story entitled “WiFi Turns Internet Into Hideout for Criminals,” the Washington Post asserts, among other things: Open wireless signals are akin to leaving your front door wide open all day — and returning home to find that someone has stolen your belongings and left a mess that needs cleaning. An open WiFi signal […]

In today’s LA Times, media columnist Tim Rutten discusses the Anna Nicole Smith frenzy and its somewhat dismal implications for journalism’s more honorable traditions in a digital era. Key quote: Television ratings or aggregated “hits” on newspaper websites constitute useful marketing information. When they’re transmuted into editorial tools, what you get is a kind of […]

The National Journal’s William Powers, in “Mirror, Mirror,” writes of the “Scooter” Libby trial in Washington, where various kinds of journalistic and political malpractice (and just plain regular functioning) are on display: It’s a high-stakes game. In the Libby trial, we have a living tableau of a bunch of people who were playing it together, […]