Chris Matthews: Testosterone Overdose?
“Has a country ever won a war by avoiding enemy casualties? Isn’t that what we’re doing? We’re blowing up bridges that are dark and buildings that are empty,”
Columbine Copycats: Is News to Blame?
Virtually unheard from in coverage of copycat events were people like Park Dietz and David Phillips, whose studies have found that news reports–not movies or video games–are the prime media mover in begetting copycats.
‘I’d Take Them Out With Sex’
Journalists Trivialize Howard Stern’s Advocacy of Rape as ‘Insensitivity’
A Mote in Their Eye
Felicity Barringer, the New York Times media reporter (“Week in Review,” 4/25/99), scolded editors for publishing an Agence France Press photo of a corpse in Kosovo, an Albanian refugee killed by a NATO bomb, without adequately warning that the Serbs could have arranged the body for dramatic effect. She quoted a CBS news executive who […]
Legitimate Targets?
In their zeal to present the war against Yugoslavia as a moral crusade, members of the media sometimes slipped into the logic of ethnic cleansing.
Redefining Diplomacy
On March 23, U.S. envoy Richard Holbrooke was in Belgrade to deliver a final ultimatum to Yugoslavian President Slobodan Milosevic: Sign the Rambouillet plan—the document that emerged from the three-month-long talks in France between the Yugoslavian government, ethnic Albanians and the five-nation Contact Group—or be bombed. Milosevic’s government refused to ratify the plan, which envisioned […]
‘Perp Walks’ and Ride-Alongs
The “perp walk,” in which recent arrestees are paraded for news cameras, and the “ride along,” in which media accompany cops on the job, are standard features of mainstream media’s reporting on crime. But both practices, which involve close relationships between reporters and police, have been challenged by courts in recent months. Media aren’t […]
