Posts under ‘Media Criticism’

NY Times: Fox to Begin a ‘More Business Friendly’ News Channel. No one has ever accused CNBC, the cable TV home of Jim Cramer, Larry Kudlow and Maria Bartiromo, of being antibusiness. Until now. Yesterday, Rupert Murdoch confirmed one of the worst kept secrets in the media industry, that the News Corporation will start a […]

This headine on the Macworld site — Former Apple marketer moves to the private sector — is unintentionally hilarious. You can move to the private sector from the public sector, but the latter is government, not another company.

NY Times: Feeding Frenzy for a Big Story, Even if It’s False. To most journalists, the notion of anonymous reporters relying on anonymous sources is a red flag. “If you want to talk about a business model that is designed to manufacture mischief in large volume, that would be it,” said Ralph Whitehead Jr., a […]

Time Magazine has launched a Washington political blog, where at least one of the staffers posting to the site shows how he doesn’t get the medium at all — and perhaps needs remedial work in basic journalism, too. In this posting, entitled “The Clinton Playbook,” Jay Carney wrote, among other things: In late 1994 and […]

Consumer Reports has withdrawn a report on infant car seats that incorrectly called many of them unsafe. The mea culpa doesn’t suffice, as it lacks all detail. The magazine needs to come totally clean about this — or risk a major whack to its reputation.

Editor & Publisher: WHCA Chief Says He Did Not Tell Comedian to Back Off Bush and Iraq. The Las Vegas Review-Journal now reports that (Rich) Little claimed he did not plan to even mention Iraq or to attack the president, implying that these were the wishes of the inviters. But Steve Scully, president of the […]

Over at Micro Persuasion, Steve Rubel takes note of a new pay-per-performance system at ZDNet, where writers will be rewarded in part based on how many people read what they write. It raises questions, he observes: For example, will a blogger favor writing a sensational post that is likely to get more clicks over one […]

UPDATED I’m at the National Conference for Media Reform in Memphis, where people from around the U.S. (and in a few cases, from other nations) are talking for three days about how to change American media. Some talented folks are here. But the activist conference is also notable for what it’s lacking: any serious participation […]

Tom Stites, a former newspaper editor and a deep thinker about the journalism craft, gave a speech last summer that won plenty of well-deserved attention. In that talk — which we guest-posted here, entitled “Is media performance democracy’s critical issue?” — he posed a key question about our future. Now he’s back with an essay […]

Columbia Journalism Review: Parsing the “Surge”: Now we have “surge,” the word that’s been recruited by the administration to sum up its new Iraq policy, to be unveiled in a speech tomorrow night. Used to describe the addition of 20,000 troops to the Baghdad area, “surge” has become, in the last few weeks, part of […]