Posts under ‘Media Criticism’

Here’s the Dow Jones “Special Committee’s Statement” about its helplessness — which has been entirely evident from the beginning — in the wake of Murdoch’s ridding himself of the Wall Street Journal’s managing editor, a journalist who was part of the old regime. Again, it’s his company’s paper now, and he and his team get […]

Portfolio: How Murdoch Cheated ‘WSJ’ Independence Pact. Only the very naive didn’t expect Rupert Murdoch to find some sly way around the agreement he made to respect The Wall Street Journal’s editorial independence once it was his. But when the time came, there was nothing very sly about it at all: Murdoch just did exactly […]

My friend Tom Stites sends along a pointer to the New York Times story, “Insurer Says Economy Has Dented Its Prospects,” which begins: It is never a good thing if many of your customers can no longer afford what you are selling. The UnitedHealth Group, which announced disappointing first-quarter earnings on Tuesday, said the weakening […]

NY Times: Behind Analysts, the Pentagon’s Hidden Hand. Records and interviews show how the Bush administration has used its control over access and information in an effort to transform the analysts into a kind of media Trojan horse — an instrument intended to shape terrorism coverage from inside the major TV and radio networks. Analysts […]

Tom Shales, Washington Post: In Pa. Debate, The Clear Loser Is ABC. For the first 52 minutes of the two-hour, commercial-crammed show, Gibson and Stephanopoulos dwelled entirely on specious and gossipy trivia that already has been hashed and rehashed, in the hope of getting the candidates to claw at one another over disputes that are […]

At UC Berkeley’s Journalism School tomorrow evening, there’s a Screening of “Citizen McCaw”: the new documentary film about the journalism ethics battle and meltdown at the Santa Barbara News Press. The screening will be followed by a panel discussion on the state of journalism with former News Press Editor Jerry Roberts, “Citizen McCaw” director Sam […]

David Carr (NYT): Dirty Job, but Someone Has to Do It – New York Times. Go to a nondescript office building on the East side of Manhattan, down the hall to a door already in the clutches of a fake dismembered hand, and you will find the newsroom of The Smoking Gun. The take-no-prisoners Web […]

LA Times: CBS layoffs signal a financial squeeze on TV stations. CBS insists that the quality of its (local) news won’t suffer because of the cuts, which hit three-quarters of the company’s 27 stations. Right, because local TV journalism is already pretty much at rock-bottom.

ZDNet: Anatomy of a ‘Blogging will kill you’ story: Why I didn’t make the cut. I read the New York Times’ take on how the stress of blogging and how it can kill you with great interest: I was interviewed for it. But I pretty much knew I wouldn’t make the final story as my […]

A truly extraordinary example of journalistic malfeasance is playing out right now. Attorney General Michael Mukasey told a San Francisco audience last week that the Bush administration was aware in the days before the 9/11 attacks that an Al Qaeda official was making calls from a “safe house in Afghanistan” to U.S. but that our […]