Posts under ‘Media Criticism’

E&P: Wash Post’s Brauchli: Newspapers Warned Readers of Economic Crisis. “There were good stories throughout, good stories about the risks,” Brauchli added. “The truth is, there was always skeptical coverage by the major newspapers. The Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Financial Times, all have written about these issues. The scale of […]

In a long investigative piece on John McCain and the gambling industry – “For McCain and Team, a Host of Ties to Gambling” — the New York Times has done something noteworthy beyond excellent reporting. It doesn’t adopt the misleading word “gaming” that the gambling industry prefers to use in describing itself. Several people quoted […]

If you’ve been reading the traditional press to try to understand the financial meltdown of the past week and the government’s responses, you’ve probably become more confused than enlightened. This comes as no surprise, given the general ignorance of economics among so many journalists. They’re doubly burdened now, they’re confronting the typical (these days) lack […]

Columbia Journalism Review: Boiler Room. It seems to me that well into Year II of the Panic, the business press is in the process of making the same mistake it made in the run-up to the debacle: focusing on esoteric Wall Street concerns and ignoring the simplest, most basic, but most important one—the breathtaking corruption […]

NBC has every right to take Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews out of their anchor chairs for political events. But there’s a bizarre double standard at work in much of the traditional media commentary on this. In the Washington Post, for example, Larry Grossman, former president of NBC News, is quoted as saying that MSNBC […]

Props to TVNewser’s Steven Krakauer, who has an interview with Brian Ross of ABC News. Ross is the journalist who in 2001 fueled our national fears with his reporting on the anthrax killings, citing unnamed sources who falsely linked the anthrax attacks to Saddam Hussein and Iraq. In light of recent (and still somewhat murky) […]

UPDATED ABC News’ behavior surrounding one of its biggest “scoops” is already an object lesson of what’s wrong with American journalism. The news organization has proved unwilling — so far, at any rate — to come clean about how it was manipulated in the 2001 (and later) investigation into the anthrax attacks in the US […]

UPDATED Below, you’ll find a pointer to Will Bunch’s American Journalism Review story about journalists’ disconnection with the communities they cover. He interviewed me by email for this piece, and quoted from what I told him — accurately and in context — at the end of the article. For an even larger context, here’s what […]

Will Bunch (American Journalism Review: Disconnected. As embattled news organizations try to safeguard their futures with intensely local coverage, there is often a wide gulf between journalists and the communities they cover.

Talking Points Memo: Big News Orgs Fail To Label McCain Attack Ad What It Is: False. (Y)ou’d think the fact that the McCain ad contains a blatant falsehood would merit a mention in the coverage. They must be talking about the big news organizations that occupy a parallel universe.