Blog Profile / Columbia Journalism Review
| URL : | http://www.cjr.org/ | |
|---|---|---|
| Filed Under: | Media / Media Industry News | |
| Posts on Regator: | 11437 | |
| Posts / Week: | 43.2 | |
| Archived Since: | April 26, 2008 | |
Blog Post Archive
More than just marriage
There's been a diversity of gay news this month covered in the major media, from the rash of NYC hate crimes against gay men, to the story about a Texas lesbian couple forced apart because of a morality clause in one of the partner's divorce papers, to yesterday's Boy Scout vote to allow gay youths membership. But too often, the...
Fortune goes long on Amazon and taxes
I've been following the Amazon tax-avoidance story for years now, and I haven't seen it better-told than it is on the cover of the new Fortune. Peter Elkind and Doris Burke get nearly 6,000 words to tell the story, and though it's a bit of a clip job, it's a very good clip job. Sometimes a story is out there...
Rooting out bad science
The extraordinary case of academic fraudster Diederick Stapel followed the typical narrative of a scientific scandal. A professor of social psychology at Tilburg University, he became a star researcher in his native Netherlands and abroad...Show More Summary
Who's filibustering Medicaid expansion in Nebraska?
FAIRWAY, KS -- On May 15, hundreds of demonstrators gathered outside the state Capitol in Lincoln, NE, to protest the filibuster that has blocked a bill expanding Medicaid to 54,000 new patients in the state, in accordance with the federal Affordable Care Act. The demonstrators knew what they were protesting against. But they didn't know exactly whom. Here's the situation:...
The weekly grind
A writer I greatly admire, Ta-Nehisi Coates, once offered this exercise in understanding what it's like to produce a weekly opinion column: "Spend a week counting all the original ideas you have. Then try to write each one down, in all its nuance, in 800 words. Perhaps you'd be very successful at this. Now try to do it for four...
How extreme is that legislator, really?
When Republican Scott Brown faced Democrat Martha Coakley in a January 2010 special election for Ted Kennedy's Senate seat, he was criticized by Coakley and other Democrats as being too conservative. But was he really a conservative at all? Media coverage at the time frequently bought into the claim that Brown was a conservative, which coincided with some of the...
Audit Notes: The IRS story in context, Silicon Valley oligarchs
The bulk of the IRS scandal press coverage has been seriously devoid of the kind of context that tells readers how and why the targeting of Tea Party groups was almost certainly not a Nixonian plot from the Oval Office to intimidate political opponents. So it's great to see ProPublica's excellent piece showing why the scandal is way, way over-hyped...
In Pittsburgh campaign, ad buy files prove mayor's involvement
DETROIT, MI -- About three weeks before the May 21 mayoral primary in Pittsburgh, an attack ad against a leading Democratic candidate, city councilmember Bill Peduto, hit the air. "We need a mayor for all of Pittsburgh. Not just Bill Peduto's neighborhood," the ad's narrator intones. Negative ads are nothing new, of course, but this one was unusual. It was...
Silver linings newscasts
Like everyone else this week, I was transfixed by the tragedy in Moore, Oklahoma. The devastation was quick and, in some neighborhoods, complete. I streamed local coverage of the event from KFOR and over the course of Monday afternoon noticed a narrative was developing. News outlets were looking for good, positive stories to report just a few hours after the...
True the Coverage
Just about everyone in Washington agrees that the IRS's blanket targeting of Tea Party groups by keying on words in their titles was, at best, misguided. But that doesn't mean that every Tea Party organization that found itself under the IRS microscope was wrongly targeted--a nuance sometimes lost in the coverage. Take True the Vote, a project of...
Bloggers for hire on a penny-stock pump and dump
The Motley Fool's Brian Richards posts a fascinating look inside the pump and dump world of penny-stock promoters, reporting how the hype machine worked in the case of a shell company called Goff Corporation. Richards describes GoffShow More Summary
Copyright 101.2
CopyrightX, an online course run out of Harvard this spring as part of the EdX program, was unusual in a couple of ways. It might not strictly be called a MOOC--a massive open online course--because it wasn't open. More than four thousand people applied, and enrollment was capped at 500. Half of the selected students were women. There were equal...
Medicare Uncovered: Who should pay? Who can pay?
Elizabeth O'Brien's May 15 Marketwatch piece on proposed changes for Medicare is one of the best I have seen since the government's health program for elderly and disabled people surfaced last year as a likely target for the federal budget axe. It still is a target, and that makes O'Brien's effort all the more important. Her story acknowledges an aspect...
Under the bridge
Frustrating as they may be, every journalist wonders at some point about the identity of his or her most devoted online hecklers, but The Climate Desk's James West and Tim McDonnell just couldn't let it go. Citing research that found that "uncivil discourse" in social media and comments sections can have a polarizing affect on consumers of science news, and...
OKC's TV news excels in another disaster
In Oklahoma, particularly in the springtime, dangerous weather is a part of life. And so are the local TV news stations in my home state. Chances are good that the bottom corner of your TV screen come May has the familiar map of the state covered with red, yellow, and green Doppler radar images on loop denoting the severity of...
A hat tip to The State in South Carolina
COLUMBIA, SC -- The State newspaper, South Carolina's capital city daily in Columbia, gave uncharacteristically prominent play Sunday to the influence that ex-lawmakers and other public officials have as they lobby their former colleagues at the State House. Show More Summary
Pleas-ing words
One man "pleaded guilty to DWI." Another "pled guilty of DWI." A third "entered a plea of guilty to DWI charges." What's going on, aside from way too much drinking? Prepositions are little words with great power. As discussed here many times, just a few letters can radically alter meaning. Just change "I'm stuck on you" to "I'm stuck with...
Scandal!
I have been commenting on Washington scandals for nearly four decades--ever since the dead-drunk Wilbur Mills, the unduly lionized chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, was stopped by the police in the middle of the night accompanied by a stripper, Fanny Foxe, who immediately dove into the Tidal Basin. As a national columnist rather than a reporter, I...
'We are all journalists now'
In a 2011 court case in Diyarbak?r, Turkey, a student is on trial for membership in a terrorist organization. The case is legally open to the public, but no journalists are present in the small, cramped courtroom. After several hours, one of the police officers perusing his Twitter account outside discovers that someone is tweeting updates from the trial. He...
Audit Notes: WSJ on the IRS, countering Kinsley, Cramer gets an 'F'
Rupert Murdoch must have loved his Wall Street Journal front page on Saturday. Editors splashed this headline across the top of the paper: Higher-Ups Knew of IRS Case Hearing Shows Obama Administration Officials Were Told in June 2012 of Probe Into Tea-Party Targeting Headlines like these, with their dark insinuations, play right into the hands of the paper's columnists, who...