Buried in this New York Times story is the following incredible finding from a new poll: Six in 10 Americans said in the poll that administration officials deliberately misled the public in making a case for the war; 33 percent of all Americans, including 40 percent of Republicans and 27 percent of Democrats, say Saddam […]
Posts under ‘Media Criticism’
Interview Answers that Beg for a Follow-Up
CNBC’s Maria Bartiromo interviewed Angelo Mozilo, CEO of Countrywide, the huge mortgage and financial company whose stock has been taking a beating as the housing bubble has started to deflate. He’s been selling enormous amounts of stock in the last year, making about $129 million, or about a third of the $406 million he’s collected […]
Kid Nation: Murrow Spinning in His Grave
San Jose Mercury News: CBS feels bite of `Kid Nation’ controversy. Throwing even more fuel on the fire: the agreement signed by the parents of the kids and the production company, a copy of which was obtained by the New York Times. In the contract – a standard one used by most reality shows – […]
Self-Referential Linkage by Wall Street Journal
In a story about Yahoo’s latest executive reorganization, the Wall Street Journal gave credit where it was due, sort ot. The paper noted that news of the changes had appeared earlier on AllThingsD site and Valleywag. Dow Jones owns AllThingsD. It doesn’t own Valleywag. I linked to both sites in this posting. The Journal only […]
Neglecting to Mention That Other Mortgage-Meltdown Villain
Howard Kurtz, in his Washington Post “Media Notes Extra,” has an appropriate caution for journalists: Memo to the media: Everyone who is defaulting on a home mortgage is not necessarily a victim. He points out that people who took huge risks were reckless, and goes on to note that there’s “plenty of blame to go […]
Broad Brushes on Big Canvasses
Danny Glover (National Journal): Gross Generalizations About Old And New Media. It’s just plain wrong to demean an entire segment of the media, whether old or new, based on the flaws of a few practioners within it. The modern media world would be a far better place if the converging interests would crank the cynicism […]
An Astonishing Admission by a Journalism Professor
UPDATED Please read “Annals of Reporting” from today’s Talking Points Memo, in which Josh Marshall describes what looks like a classic example of journalistic malpractice. Here’s the gist. Michael Skube, a former newspaper editor and Pulitzer Prize winner who’s now a journalism professor, wrote an opinion piece for the LA Times in which he flays […]
Another Gross Journalistic Failure
UPDATED NY Times: How Missed Signs Contributed to a Mortgage Meltdown. (T)he cast of characters who missed signals like the rise of delinquencies and foreclosures is becoming easier to identify. They include investment banks happy to sell risky but lucrative mortgage debt to hedge funds hungry for high interest payments, bond rating agencies willing to […]
Yes, It's "Traditional Media" – Not "Mainstream"
Markos (Daily Kos) has abandoned the expression MSM (“mainstream media”) to call it traditional media. I’ve been doing this for several years now. I guess I should have blogged about it…
Rove's Understanding of the Media
Jay Rosen: Karl Rove and the Religion of the Washington Press. Savviness is what journalists admire in others. Savvy is what they themselves dearly wish to be. (And to be unsavvy is far worse than being wrong.) Savviness—that quality of being shrewd, practical, well-informed, perceptive, ironic, “with it,” and unsentimental in all things political—is, in […]