Do You Change the Weather When You Change the Climate? Yes
Once you’ve altered the atmosphere, every single weather phenomenon–every storm, every dry spell, every unremarkably pleasant day–is a result of that altered atmosphere.
Jim Naureckas
When ‘Factchecking’ Means Telling Your Colleagues They’re Liars
Factchecking ought to be an everyday part of each journalist’s job, but instead it’s relegated to a specialty feature. Maybe lack of regular practice explains why those side efforts are so disappointing. Take Glenn Kessler of the Washington Post‘s piece (6/21/12) on Barack Obama’s latest ad critical of presumptive Republican nominee Mitt Romney. Kessler gives […]
Turning Down a Free Palace for Everyone Requires a Very Good Reason
Imagine an amazing new invention that allowed anyone to duplicate any existing building, using no resources. However, the law requires you to pay for such instant buildings, at about the price of those made the old-fashioned way, on the grounds that allowing everyone to live in their ideal home for free would make it hard […]
WaPo’s Plug for Health Insurer Misses the Deadly Fine Print
The Washington Post (6/11/12) had a story by headlined “Largest Health Insurer to Keep Key Parts of Law Regardless of Court Ruling.” In the piece, reporter N.C. Aizenman relayed UnitedHealthcare’s announcement that even if the Obama healthcare law is struck down by the Supreme Court, the company “will keep in place several key consumer provisions”: […]
Does Fox Hire Uninformed Pundits;or Does Being on Fox Make You Uninformed?
On the popular Fox News show the Five (6/6/12), co-host Eric Bolling blasted Muslim advocates who are suing the New York Police Department over its spying program targeting Muslims, saying that in the last 15 years, “Every terrorist on American soil has been a Muslim.” In fact, Muslims are responsible for a tiny fraction of […]
D.C. Press Corps Sits on Hands as Actual Reporter Is Silenced
For a dramatic presentation of what’s wrong with the D.C. press corps, watch as In These Times reporter Mike Elk is silenced by Honeywell goons as he tries to ask a question about a poison gas leak—and his colleagues sit quietly by, except for one who encourages the goons because Mike doesn’t have a credential […]
It’s Not About Climate Change—It’s About Keeping Advertisers Happy
Scientific American has a dilemma (Extra!, 2/11): It takes advertising from oil companies whose profits depend on denying the most important scientific fact of our era, the reality of human-caused climate change. The magazine would lose its whole brand identity if it pretended global warming wasn’t happening, but there are things short of that that […]
Gawker’s New Media Model: Have Advertisers Edit Content
How’s this for a business model for new media? Have people talk about products, and let the corporations who make the products pay to control the conversation. That’s Gawker‘s new sure-fire money-making scheme, according to CJR (5/24/12), which quotes a memo from the media gossip site: “In two years, our primary offering to marketers will […]
Why It Matters That There’s No Such Thing as Simpson-Bowles
Dan Balz, the Washington Post‘s chief White House correspondent (5/20/12), complains that President Barack Obama hasn’t solved America’s fiscal problems: Obama has drawn criticism for failing to offer more forceful leadership. He established the Simpson-Bowles commission but declined opportunities at key moments to push and prod for its consideration and enactment. There’s an odd syntax […]
Action Alert: Address Conflict of Interest at NYT’s Jerusalem Bureau
A new FAIR Action Alert (5/16/12) calls on the New York Times public editor to address the conflict of interest posed by Jerusalem correspondent Isabel Kershner’s marriage to someone whose job it is to sway the coverage of international outlets like the Times in a pro-Israel direction. Please leaves copies of your messages to the […]
Time Ignores Climate Change to Paint a ‘Golden Age’ of Fracking
You have to wonder: Do journalists covering energy issues imagine they and their loved ones are going to be living on another planet in the not-too-distant future? That seems like the only reason you would write a piece about the world discovering ways to extract and burn vast new quantities of hydrocarbons without mentioning one […]
WaPo Surprised Voters Getting Chance to Weigh In on Ryan Budget
The Washington Post (5/13/12) ran a piece by Ed O’Keefe under this headline: Ryan Budget Still an Issue in Congressional Races Still? You mean candidates keep talking about Rep. Paul Ryan’s proposal to replace Medicare with an entirely inadequate privatized health insurance program–even though the upcoming elections are the first chance voters will have to […]
NYT Reassures Afghans That the Troops They Want to Leave Are Going to Stay
The New York Times‘ Alissa Rubin (5/2/12) reports of President Barack Obama’s trip to Afghanistan: The trip communicated something of vital importance to the Afghans: reassurance that the United States is not in an all-out scramble to get away. It’s not clear what the basis for Rubin’s claim that “reassurance” that the U.S. is in […]
For WaPo, Promises to the Elderly Have ‘No Economic Significance’
I gave my daughter a tip on being a media critic: “If you see a newspaper article with the words ‘Social Security’ in the title,” I told her, “it’s probably bad.” Sure enough, the article we were looking at—”Fixing Social Security,” by Washington Post columnist Allan Sloan (4/29/12)—was pretty terrible. Sloan’s argument is that cuts […]
Richard Cohen on Candidate Lying Is Half-Baked—and Half Cribbed
Richard Cohen says he envies people who are persuasive liars. He really ought to envy people who are persuasive writers. His column today (4/17/12) is ostensibly about how Mitt Romney is a big liar. It goes almost its entire length, though, before citing any compelling examples of Romney lying. (Cohen does say call Romney’s claim […]
Are Apple and Publishers Helping Readers by Ripping Them Off?
The Justice Department alleges that Apple‘s collusion with book publishers to fix ebook prices has cost readers $100 million. So why are so many news reports on the anti-trust suit suggesting that the Apple/publisher alliance is actually good for consumers? The New York Times‘ David Streitfeld (4/12/12) warns: Amazon, which already controls about 60 percent […]
The One Graph That Explains Why Copyright Is Too Long
From Matthew Yglesias (3/30/12), one simple chart that illustrates why copyright terms are way, way, way too long for the good of the culture: Books published before 1923 are in the public domain; we read a lot of them (based on Amazon shipping figures). Books published in the past 10 or 20 years or so […]
Geraldo Rivera and the Pre-Post-Racial America
Remember when the presidential candidacy of Barack Obama was going to usher in a new “post-racial” era in American politics? It was obvious at the time that that was a pipe dream, but it’s remarkable how much the U.S. discourse on race has actually gone backward–as illustrated by Fox News personality Geraldo Rivera’s comments on […]
NYT on Diabolical Experiments: Better Than Being Eaten by Sharks
Imagine that there’s a mad scientist living on an island surrounded by treacherous, shark-infested waters. When ships are wrecked on the hidden rocks, the survivors swim to the island to escape the sharks, where they become prisoners of the mad scientist, who subjects them to bizarre experiments for his own amusement. When people point out […]
Media’s Weird Ethics: Pretending to Be Someone Else Is Worse Than Facilitating Global Catastrophe
There’s a popular verb in headlines about climate researcher Peter Gleick’s admission that he used trickery to get damning documents out of the climate change–denialist group the Heartland Institute: “Activist Says He Lied to Obtain Climate Papers” (New York Times, 2/21/12); “Scientist Peter Gleick Admits He Lied to Get Climate Documents” (L.A. Times, 2/21/12); “Climate […]
