Posts under ‘Media Criticism’

I’m an advisor to NewsTrust, a site where people rate news articles and blog postings for accuracy and quality. So I’m happy to report that the site just was awarded a substantial grant from the MacArthur Foundation. Fabrice Florin and his team have done amazing work to bring the service this far. Now they’ll have […]

One of the most amazing episodes in modern American journalism has emerged from a flagrantly inaccurate and misguided Time magazine column by Joe Klein. He’s a political writer whose work in this case may become Exhibit A for what’s wrong with the craft today. Klein’s column attacked congressional Democrats’ effort to pass electronic surveillance legislation […]

Clark Hoyt, the paper’s public editor, notes the NY Times’ continuing publication of pieces by Henry Blodget, one of the Internet bubble’s most notorious characters. In “Taint by Association” Hoyt asks two key questions: One is whether The Times properly identifies Blodget when he writes for the paper. I don’t think so. His name was […]

My friend Walt Mossberg, the Wall Street Journal’s superb tech columnist, has a plea in today’s paper called “Free My Phone” — asking the government force open what he calls the “Soviet Ministry” model of mobile phone service, a system that treats customers as if they were pawns. Great piece, with one exception, where he […]

The SF Chronicle banners on its front page, “Neighborhoods Crumble in Wave of Foreclosures“: The combination of plunging values and higher mortgage payments created the perfect breeding ground for foreclosures. Homeowners who could not afford escalating monthly payments also could not refinance if their homes were worth less than the mortgages, and could not sell […]

Clark Hoyt (NY Times Public Editor): Betraying Its Own Best Interests. I think the ad violated The Times’s own written standards, and the paper now says that the advertiser got a price break it was not entitled to. So, the paper may well have cut MoveOn a special deal (though if you read Hoyt’s piece […]

On Larry King’s program, Dan Rather insisted again that the 60 Minutes story about George W. Bush’s National Guard “service” — based in part on the documents that CBS failed to prove authentic – was fair and accurate. Of the panel CBS selected to investigate the debacle, he said: (A)mong the things they concluded after […]

In the coverage of the housing bubble deflation, journalists continue to use an expression that defies reality. From today’s Bloomberg story: As many as half of the 450,000 subprime borrowers whose mortgage payments increase in the next three months may lose their homes because they can’t sell, refinance or qualify for help from the U.S. […]

AP: Dan Rather files $70M suit against CBS. Dan Rather filed a $70 million lawsuit against CBS and his former bosses Wednesday, claiming they made him a “scapegoat” for a discredited story about President Bush’s military service during the Vietnam War. When, oh when, will journalists stop falling for the bogus PR stunts lawyers and […]

UPDATED Observe “Trashing Petraeus,” an editorial in today’s Wall Street Journal. It weeps for the loss of civility in political discourse, pointing to a MoveOn.org advertisement in yesterday’s New York Times and congressional Democrats’ silence about it as evidence that “the ability of the U.S. political system to function will be impaired in a way […]