Posts under ‘Media Criticism’

In the New York Times yesterday, the second paragraph of James Risen’s story, “Bush Signs Law to Widen Reach for Wiretapping,” reads: Congressional aides and others familiar with the details of the law said that its impact went far beyond the small fixes that administration officials had said were needed to gather information about foreign […]

Michael Miner (Chicago Reader): Terms of Concealment: How transparent can a news shop be when it sends off former employees with hush money? True transparency, then, is not only too much to hope for but probably more than we’re entitled to. Let sinners come clean to their priests. Newspapers are entitled to their quirky little […]

Of course the “Editorial Review Committee” being created to supposedly assure editorial independence at Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal “Looks Like A 98-Pound Weakling,” as Editor & Publisher’s Mark Fitzgerald writes. It was designed that way. Look. Murdoch is buying Dow Jones. The owner gets to decide. Period. This guy isn’t going to give up […]

Wired News’ Ryan Singel notes: Given this Administration’s track record on truthfulness, secrecy and overseas bungling, why is Congress even contemplating giving them more authority to spy on American citizens without even the slightest supervision from the secret and submissive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance court? Why this country is even contemplating allowing the nation’s intelligence services […]

Dan Kennedy: The peoples’ presses. There’s no question that the large media institutions (Russell) Baker so loves are fading away, and we don’t yet know what will come next. “How the internet might replace the newspaper as a source of information is never explained by those who assure you that it will,” Baker writes. To […]

David Lazarus has been, in general, an excellent business columnist at the San Francisco Chronicle. He’s taken consumer protection more seriously than just about any journalist in California, and perhaps the nation. Now he’s moving to the Los Angeles Times, where I hope he’ll thrive. I hope his editors there are as tough-minded as the […]

Am I the only one who said “Oh, please” after seeing Martha Stewart on the cover of this month’s Wired magazine? Well, at least they didn’t put Enron’s Jeff Skilling on the cover.

The media column in the British Independent newspaper this week contains this remarkable passage, near the top: Robert Thomson, the present editor of The (London) Times, nonetheless seems quite likely to exchange his once great office for a job on The Wall Street Journal. This depends on Rupert Murdoch acquiring the American business title, which […]

In London for a meeting with colleagues on a non-journalism project, I’ve been devouring the British press — noting, not for the first time, that the papers here do something that U.S. media folks do too little: tough media criticism. For example, the BBC is taking some serious lumps over an astonishing internal ethical mess, […]

Scott Rosenberg, in “There is no “first blogger,” dismantles the Wall Street Journal’s well-intentioned but surprisingly clueless weekend round-up about the so-called 10th anniversary of blogging. At issue, for many folks, are the Journal’s assertions about who did things first in the weblog world. By general agreement the newspaper got it wrong. In We the […]