Posts under ‘Media Criticism’

Jay Rosen: Audience Atomization Overcome: Why the Internet Weakens the Authority of the Press. In the age of mass media, the press was able to define the sphere of legitimate debate with relative ease because the people on the receiving end were atomized– connected “up” to Big Media but not across to each other. And […]

The New York Times has been among the prime examples of media organizations that refuse to call torture what it is: torture. The euphamism that the Times and other traditional (and cowardly) media outlets have been using has typically been “enhanced interrogation techniques” — despite the fact that at least one of those techniques, waterboarding, […]

David Carr, NY Times: Stoking Fear Everywhere You Look. Every modern recession includes a media séance about how horrible things are and how much worse they will be, but there have never been so many ways for the fear to leak in. The same digital dynamics that drove the irrational exuberance — and marketed the […]

UPDATED The New York Times’ David Barstow has an astonishing piece in today’s paper, “One Man’s Military-Industrial-Media Complex,” about former “drug czar” and retired general Barry McCaffrey, one of many retired military people working as supposedly independent analysts for various news organizations but who are anything but independent. The story’s biggest surprise — perhaps it […]

The Houston Chronicle reports a poll that “finds 23% of Texans think Obama is Muslim” but stops there. If I ran a newspaper in Texas, I’d make it a mission to help that quarter of the population learn a) that Obama is not a Muslim; and b) that, as Colin Powell said (and so few […]

Associated Press: September new home sales rise by 2.7 percent. Sales of new homes recorded an unexpected increase in September as median home prices dropped to the lowest level in four years, the Commerce Department reported Monday… In the universe most of us inhabit, crashing prices generally lead to more turnover.

Politico: Gameday, turning the most important election of our lifetimes into “who won the day.” Pathetic. Politico wants to be taken seriously. This is why you can’t.

Dean Reynolds, CBS News: Reporter’s Notebook: Seeing How The Other Half Lives – From The Road: Maybe a front-running campaign like Obama’s that is focused solely on victory doesn’t have the time to do the mundane things like print up schedules or attend to the needs of reporters. But in politics, everything that goes around […]

In today’s Wall Street Journal story about the deflation of the housing bubble, “Housing Pain Gauge: Nearly 1 in 6 Owners ‘Under Water’,” consider this passage: Stephanie and Jason Kirschenman thought they were being prudent when they agreed in late 2004 to buy a new four-bedroom home in Lodi, Calif., for $458,000. They put a […]

UPDATED NY Times: Apple Denies ‘Citizen Journalist Report’. Apple’s stock took a brief roller coaster ride this morning after a CNN “citizen journalist” wrote that an “insider” reported that Steve Jobs had been rushed to the hospital with chest pains. Aha! Those infernal citizen journalists are ruining the world! Calm down. CNN got used. Maybe […]