FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
MSNBC‘s Morning Joe program seems to have turned its conspicuous consumption of Starbucks drinks into a paid commercial for the coffee chain, according to this morning’s New York Times (6/1/09). As Brian Stelter put it, Joe Scarborough “sips Frappuccinos on camera so often that some viewers have wondered whether it is a form of product […]
Looking at “people of a certain age” for whom “getting a letter published in the Times has always been a very, very big deal,” David Margolick (Nation , 5/27/09) tells the tale of two lifelong friends and constant New York Times letter submitters–one with a “Babe Ruth”-like record of getting his views into print, and […]
Posting to the Columbia Journalism Review‘s Behind the News blog, Megan Garber (5/26/09) catches New York Times public editor Clark Hoyt espousing “a peculiar brand of institutional defensiveness” in his May 23 column: One that plays itself out via divisiveness–and via, in particular, a false dichotomy that aggrandizes Times reporters and dismisses those who are […]
Jonathan Schwarz recently caught the Washington Post crediting the author of an anti-progressive tax op-ed as just “an economics professor,” when in fact he sat on tax-funded bailout beneficiary “AIG’s board of directors. He’s also a member of the board’s finance committee.” Now, continuing (A Tiny Revolution, 5/21/09) to mine the Post‘s editorial page for […]
New York Times media reporter Tim Arango has a story (5/20/09) on one very serious repercussion from shrinking corporate news outlets: Opponents of the death penalty looking to exonerate wrongly accused prisoners say their efforts have been hobbled by the dwindling size of America’s newsrooms, and particularly the disappearance of investigative reporting at many regional […]
Taking note of Bill O’Reilly’s “cheerleading the downfall” of newspapers–“he reacted with glee when the Seattle Post-Intelligencer was forced to go Web-only. More recently in his column, O’Reilly similarly wisecracked about the New York Times‘ financial woes”–MediaWeek editor Mike Shields (Editor & Publisher, 5/18/09) challenges “O’Reilly’s theory for why these publications are in such deep […]
Corporate media’s arguments against Google are getting stranger and stranger. While previously the Washington Post had accused the search engine of “vacuum[ing] up their content without paying a dime,” now the Post has media lawyers Bruce Sanford and Bruce Brown (5/16/09) charging that search engines “crawl the Web and ingest everything in their path.” Can […]
Blogger and Philadelphia Inquirer writer Will Bunch has a review (Attytood, 5/11/09) of how, “by late last year, the world already knew a great deal about John Yoo, the Philadelphia native and conservative legal scholar whose tenure in the Bush administration as a top Justice Department lawyer lies at the root of the period of […]
The Associated Press‘ Shawn Pogatchnik (5/12/09) has the incredible and deeply alarming story of Dublin sociology student Shane Fitzgerald having “posted a poetic but phony quote on Wikipedia” just as the world’s reporters were writing up the March 18 death of composer Maurice Jarre. Intended for “testing how our globalized, increasingly Internet-dependent media was upholding […]
Hearing “the whining retreat of a whipped pup instead of the toothy growl of a watchdog,” the Colorado Independent‘s John Tomasic (5/11/09) quotes Washington Post reporter Paul Kane answering an online question with a new excuse for refusing to “call waterboarding people and slamming them into walls torture”–“because [the Post] fears a lawsuit for libel”: […]
Medical librarian blogger Laika Spoetnik (Laika’s MedLibLog, 5/8/09) has taken a long look at the international media “tsunami” generated by the Australian paper’s one sentence on “a fake Elsevier/Merck journal. It says: ‘The drug company also allegedly produced an entire journal–called the Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine–and passed it off as an independent […]
Free Press‘ new report suggesting “how the government should respond to the current crisis in journalism”–“Saving the News: Toward a National Journalism Strategy” (5/12/09)–addresses both “short- and long-term strategies.” Among their transformative ideas: New Ownership Structures. Encouraging the establishment of nonprofit and low-profit news organizations through tax-exempt and low-profit limited liability company (L3C) models. New […]
We’ve written about this before, but today (5/11/09) the Washington Post‘s Howard Kurtz turned in another example of journalists who seem to believe Google is what’s killing their industry.Responding totalks between his employer and Google about some sort of collaboration, Kurtz writes: Hanging over the talks is the reality that the search giant, while funneling […]
Bringing us the news that “the North Carolina legislature just sent a bill to study committee (a.k.a shelved it at least until next year) that would have crippled municipal broadband projects in the state,” AlterNet‘s Tana Ganeva (5/6/09) tells “why that’s a really, really good (albeit temporary) thing”: According to a recent study, America ranks […]
In a column attacking Google and other “accused newspaper industry killers,” the Washington Post‘s Dana Milbank (5/7/09) doesn’t present much of an argument for why newspapers are dying—but he provides an excellent example of why journalism like his deserves to die. [Marissa] Mayer, who oversees Google News, explained how “Google is doing its part” to […]
Interviewing Progressive magazine editor Matt Rothschild on Democracy Now! (5/1/09), Juan Gonzalez and Amy Goodman get the now 100-year-old magazine’s high-minded take on the threatened existence of other periodicals: Rothschild: Well, the magazine industry is in crisis. The newspaper industry is in crisis. A lot of the news weeklies donâ┚¬Ã¢”ž¢t know how to function right […]
Free Press is welcoming (4/28/09) as “a long overdue step in the right direction” the news that “Cablevision announced plans to offer download speeds of 101Mbps and upload speeds of 15Mbps” without charging “usage caps or overage fees” to users. Research director S. Derek Turner explains that the plan does, however, beg the question why […]
Free Press Campaign Director Tim Karr (SaveTheInternet.com, 4/16/09) is celebrating Time Warner Cable having “shelved its plan to impose excessive Internet fees against those who use the Web for more than email and basic surfing.” Karr details how Time Warner Cable had been testing new Internet use penalties on people in Beaumont, Texas, and planned […]
Maureen Dowd today (New York Times, 4/15/09) writes about the newspaper industry’s complaints about Google: Robert Thomson, the top editor of the Wall Street Journal, denounced websites like Google as “tapeworms.” His boss, Rupert Murdoch, said that big newspapers do not have to let Google “steal our copyrights.” The AP has threatened to take legal […]
Author and journalist Sheila Gibbons has some regrettably foreseeable news (Womens eNews, 3/30/09) on how female reporters who “worked hard to establish themselves in what had long been a male-dominated field” are faring in a time of massive media cutbacks and layoffs: By the end of 2009, a quarter of all the newsroom jobs that […]
