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 [...]

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 [...]

The Princeton political scientists Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels analyzed survey data from the 1990’s to prove this point. During the first term of Bill Clinton’s presidency, the budget deficit declined by more than 90 percent. However, when Republican voters were asked in 1996 what happened to the deficit under Clinton, more than 55 percent said that [...]

“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 [...]

The market has voted journalism off the island. This necessary nutrient of democracy will be washed away unless we recognize that commercial values are no longer going to provide us with sufficient quality journalism. It’s a waste of valuable time attempting to cook up new schemes to make the process of news gathering and distribution [...]

The Cato Institute’s Julian Sanchez takes us through a recent Fox News report dealing with the Patriot Act. As you will see, it’s not a question of Fox making a mistake here or there—the entire Fox report is essentially devoid of fact, concocted in some politically supercharged alternate reality.
via Harper’s Magazine online.

Two weeks ago I nearly spewed my morning coffee all over the kitchen while listening to a Morning Edition reporter (I forget which one) who was talking about health care reform make the bizarre statement that there’s no support for a public option, which flies in the face of polling that puts support for public [...]