Promise Keepers, Media Sleepers
It's easy to tell what makes folks in the establishment media nervous. When black men came together in Washington, D.C. for 1995's Million Man March, most journalists scrutinized with healthy skepticism the political agenda fueling the Nation of Islam-led event. Many came down hard and heavy on the organizers' exclusion of women and whites. Similarly, when Pride rallies involving thousands of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered people attracted national attention in the early 1990s, ABC World News Tonight and CNN's Larry King Live (both 3/26/93) played excerpts of a hate-filled videotape of the marches made by homophobes, and debated what ...
Saving the Earth Isn't Their Job
I knew I was in trouble when, walking into a "leadership summit" of the Society for Environmental Journalists, I tested out what I was planning to say with a young reporter. SEJ should accept investigative reporting as being a part of environmental journalism—after all, I noted, Rachel Carson, the mother of environmental journalism, practiced investigative reporting. "Rachel Carson," said the reporter, who covers the environment for a Florida newspaper, "isn't she the lady who worked for the Fish and Wildlife Service?" Investigating the Environment Much of the SEJ, a group now consisting of more than 1,000 journalists who cover environmental ...
Snow Job
The process has to be conscious, or it would not be carried out with sufficient precision, but it also has to be unconscious, or it would bring with it a feeling of falsity and hence of guilt.... To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies--all this is indispensably necessary. --George ...
Dole's Debt to the Press
Why do you need media critics when you’ve got Bob Dole? In the final weeks of the campaign, as Dole groped for some theme that would prevent him from being buried under a Clinton landslide, the Republican candidate hit on his party’s favorite imaginary enemy: the "liberal" media. At campaign stop after campaign stop, Dole blamed his dismal poll numbers on the failure of the liberal media to tell the truth about the president's character: In particular, he accused the New York Times of covering up allegations that Democratic National Committee fundraiser John Huang had unethically or illegally raised money ...
Articles in the print edition
Promise Keepers, Media Sleepers
Major Player or Big Bully
Media Bomb on TWA Crash
Manufactured news
New Media, Old Bias
Saving the Earth Isn't Their Job
