Thoughts on the plagiarism panic
One of the first things I learned in my first newsroom job was how to use a thick, black pencil to transform an official press release into a news story. You crossed out the letterhead and contact...
View ArticleThe media and the Muslim rioting
It’s rare that a story so fully exemplifies the worst tendencies of the news media as the coverage of the protest in Muslim countries over a U.S.-made video ridiculing the founder of Islam.
View ArticleTV ‘watchdogs’ quiet as political ad cash rolls in
News media that rely on ads have always had a problem covering their own advertisers. It’s rare to find a reporter who doesn’t have a story, sometimes well-founded, of an employer...
View ArticleWhy I like the debates
I like the campaign debates. I watched most of the Republican primary matchups, even after they got repetitive, and I find the current flight of televised faceoffs riveting.
View ArticleIn praise of newspaper candidate endorsements
Why do newspapers endorse political candidates?
View ArticleLibel by tweet in Britain
For all our cultural kinship, Britain and the United States approach expressive freedom in ways that are often sharply different.
View ArticleThat awful photo from the New York subway
Great news photos often come with a moral taint. Maybe it’s the gaze they enable, the way they distill misery, desperation, injury, sorrow into mere spectacle. We look, but we’re...
View ArticleScoring the media on Newtown massacre coverage
There was something reassuring about the wave of public sorrow over the Newtown massacre. After Tucson, after Aurora, after the mass shootings in a dozen other places that you or I couldn’t...
View ArticleDon’t like government secrecy? Get over it!
Two weeks ago on a cross-country flight I checked three bags, and when I unpacked I found three printed memos from the Transportation Security Administration indicating that they’d each been...
View ArticleCorruption sneaks into online media
Even while some media organizations roll out new online subscription plans, the Internet continues its steady drift toward a business model built overwhelmingly on money not from readers, but from...
View ArticleOMG — Senator Geraldo Rivera?
The spectacle of TV personality Geraldo Rivera using his soapbox with Fox News to test-market a possible run for the U.S. Senate has, not surprisingly, caused some real journalists to cough up hairballs.
View ArticleHidden dangers of the Bush email hacking episode
Media throughout the country carried news recently that a half-dozen email accounts belonging to ex-President George W. Bush and several of his friends and relatives had been hacked. The words and...
View ArticleMedia throw Pvt. Manning to the wolves
In media mythology, the years from the mid-1960s to the mid-’70s were the classical age, a heroic time of moral clarity.
View ArticleWho pays ‘unpaid’ writers’ bills?
People who make their living by writing for publication had good reason to follow the recent hoo-hah over publishers who think paying writers for their work is optional.
View ArticleTwo cheers for the news ombudsman
Word that The Washington Post was doing away with the job of ombudsman after 43 years was greeted, by and large, with a shrug and a yawn by news habitués.
View ArticlePrivacy invasion requires a good reason
Just how private is the closed-door talk of the powerful? And if the unguarded comments of politicians who assume they’re speaking in confidence are captured on tape, is it OK to make those...
View ArticleMedia: Getting it wrong in Boston
On the warm, clear morning of 9/11, with the towers still ablaze, a workmate and I set out on foot from our office in midtown Manhattan toward what later became known as Ground Zero. This was years...
View ArticleWhen ideological warriors join the news business
News and opinion parted company fairly late in the history of journalism, a split usually dated to the mid-19th century advent of steam-powered presses, paper mass-produced from wood pulp and a revenue...
View ArticleGoogle’s Glass would keep an eye on all of us
Google’s launch of its dazzling Internet-connected eyewear, which it calls Glass, has been so understated that it’s tempting to mistake this wearable computer for just another...
View ArticleSecrecy, surveillance pose challenge to media
In recent weeks, the gleaming Digital Age has been flipped over, exposing a dank underbelly of post-9/11 secrecy and surveillance reminiscent of a mid-20th-century police state, implicating not just...
View Article
