Posts under ‘Media Criticism’

The McClatchy Washington bureau series, Guantanamo: Beyond the Law, puts to shame almost all the other reporting by other news organizations. It’s falling through the cracks, because of the NIH syndrome in journalism — institutional unwillingness to talk about other journalists’ great work and what they’ve reported. One other paper has noticed. The Boston Phoenix […]

Bill Moyers is headlining the National Conference on Media Reform in Minneapolis, and just gave a powerful pitch for network neutrality and why journalism’s future is key to the future of democracy. There’s a live stream, worth watching. The conference is a gathering of mostly left-of-center media activists. That’s too bad in a way, because […]

From the New York Times homepage a few minutes ago: Sigh…

The Knight Ridder, now McClatchy, Washington Bureau was a singular hero among journalists who value great reporting and honor back during the run-up to the Iraq war and its disastrous prosecution. I was, and remain, honored to have been employed by the same company during that period when so many other journalists abandoned their duties. […]

That’s former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan’s description of Big Journalism during the Bush administration, especially during the run-up to the Iraq war. With all too few exceptions, it is true — and indelibly stains a craft from which we expect so much more. McClellan is no hero. He might have helped save lives […]

Director Sydney Pollack is has died. He made many excellent films, but the one that journalists remember best is “Absence of Malice” — a trenchant look at big-city journalism and its practitioners. Yes, the picture was over the top in key ways. But it had a core of reality, cloaked in fiction, that went to […]

You’ll find it in New York magazine’s brief Q&A With Thomas Bray, Chair of the Editorial Integrity Committee. Bray and his fellow committee members each get $100,000 a year for their lapdog duties, which involve a meeting every three months and “a fair amount of conference calling and so on…” Actually, it’s amazing that Bray […]

Looks like it: ABC “Exclusive” On McCain and the Anti-Islam Pastor: Was MoJo Robbed?

Looking through the finalists for the 2008 Gerald Loeb Award, several things stand out. Despite the excellence of the work being cited, the list of finalists should raise a note of caution about at least one key metric for the ability of American business journalists to look at major problems before negative trends turn to […]

Holman W. Jenkins Jr., who writes the Business World column in the Wall Street Journal, is one of the more predictable of pundits there — entirely on the side of business people when it comes to their innate right to do just about anything they please. Today, however, he channels a common refrain in defending […]