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Tag Archives: Journalism

Iran police chief accuses Voice of America, BBC of being arms of CIA, Britain’s MI-6

Iran’s police chief on Saturday accused the Voice of America and the BBC of being the arms of U.S. and British intelligence agencies, and warned of severe repercussions for journalists and activists caught having contacts with them, state media reported.
Gen. Ismail Ahmadi Moghaddam, whose police forces have played a key role in the government crackdown [...]

US media omission: Iran calls for global nuclear disarmament

The American public has not been informed by the US news media about highly newsworthy statements made by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Friday February 12.
He said the era of nuclear weapons is over, suggesting Iran has no plans to build “inhumane” A-bombs. Ahmadinejad called for a world free of nuclear arms in an interview with [...]

Hold Onto Your Underwear: This Is Not a National Emergency

And yet here’s the strange thing: thanks to what didn’t happen on Flight 253, the media essentially went mad, 24/7. Newspaper coverage of the failed plot and its ramifications actually grew for two full weeks after the incident until it had achieved something like full-spectrum dominance, according to the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism. In [...]

Waterboarding Is Torture Under the Law

You can have any opinion you want about waterboarding, but it is a fact that it is defined as “torture” under the relevant international treaties and federal law. That is a fact. In short, it is not “torture” to critics, it is “torture” under the law. And there is no dispute that the Bush Administration [...]

The Lobbying-Media Complex

In a single hour, two men with blatant, undisclosed conflicts of interest had appeared on MSNBC. The question is, was this an isolated oversight or business as usual? Evidence points to the latter. In 2003 The Nation exposed McCaffrey’s financial ties to military contractors he had promoted on-air on several cable networks; in 2008 David Barstow [...]

Students Create Site for College Journalists Who Want to Talk about the Craft

Two young entrepreneurs have launched an online community where college journalists are sharing ideas on technology, leadership, news judgment and content.
Kelsey A. Schnell and Brandon Martinez built CollegeNewsroom.org in Big Rapids, Mich., the home of Ferris State University.
via Poynter Online – Ask the Recruiter.

A Thousand Cuts

The point is that newspapers have been killing themselves slowly for a long time. So long as the monopoly profits rolled in, the death by a thousand cuts wasn’t paid any attention. When the Internet arrived to eliminate the advertising monopolies, the newspapers already had a foot in the grave.
That said, it wouldn’t hurt the [...]

Nonprofit journalism startups’ executive pay: How much is too much?

Bay Area News Project’s CEO Lisa Frazier has a $400,000 salary, which reminds me of the news and criticisms about Paul Steiger getting $570,000 to run ProPublica. This begs the question: how much is too much in the pay of top execs at nonprofit journalism startups.
[...]
“They can spin it any way they want, but they [...]

Seed’s Goal Is To “Redefine Journalism For The Internet Age,” Its Reality Is Untangling Cat Hair

What are some of the current assignments on Seed ready to redefine journalism?  I signed up for Seed to take a look around.  The first thing I saw is that Aol seems to want someone to write a lot of gift guides (for weddings, Father’s Day, Valentine’s Day, kids, grandparents, teachers, and groomsmen).  Then I [...]

Sen. Ted Kaufman: A ‘broad shield’ for journalists

As the Senate works to craft a shield law, one crucial issue is determining who is a journalist. In other words, whose promises of confidentiality deserve protection?
For me, it’s always instructive to go back to the founders when addressing questions like these. Who did they have in mind when they drafted a 1st Amendment that [...]

When war is peace and right is center

“War is peace, freedom is slavery and ignorance is strength” — more than a quarter-century after those oxymorons were supposed to pervade an Orwellian 1984, today’s media make such Newspeak even more preposterous: On economic issues, we are often told that right is center, center is left, and left is fringe.
For a year, national reporters [...]

In Iceland, WikiLeaks could become a more powerful tool for journalists

WikiLeaks.org, a Web site that specializes in the publication of classified or restricted information, announced that it’s pursuing an unprecedented avenue to sustain itself. Late last year the whistleblower organization began lobbying the Icelandic parliament to consider a series of bills, which if passed would transform that nation of 300,000 into a beacon of global [...]

Helen Thomas deviates from the terrorism script

Helen Thomas shows — yet again — that she’s one of the very few White House reporters willing to deviate from approved orthodoxy scripts. She asks the prohibited question about the motives of Terrorists, and keeps asking as she receives complete non-responses, until they all just decide to ignore her:
Brennan’s answer — they do [...]

Content farms v. curating farmers

One of the tools I use to blog with is a WordPress plugin made by Apture… with it, I choose supplementary content (and yes, authors, videos, pdf files, Wikipedia entries, links to Amazon products, Twitter feeds, etc. that all appear when you mouseover one of many little grey icons within the content here) to flesh out [...]

Noam Chomsky on Newspapers, the Internet, and Democracy

Here’s what else he had to say about media back in 1997:
The real mass media are basically trying to divert people. Let them do something else, but don’t bother us (us being the people who run the show). Let them get interested in professional sports, for example. Let everybody be crazed about professional sports or [...]