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Category: Journalism/Media

Our democracy is under attack. Washington journalists must stop covering it like politics as usual

Our democracy is under attack. Washington journalists must stop covering it like politics as usual

Margaret Sullivan writes: Back in the dark ages of 2012, two think-tank scholars, Norman Ornstein and Thomas Mann, wrote a book called “It’s Even Worse Than It Looks” about the rise of Republican Party extremism and its dire effect on American democracy. In a related op-ed piece, these writers made a damning statement about Washington press coverage, which treats the two parties as roughly equal and everything they do as deserving of similar coverage. Ornstein and Mann didn’t use the…

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The spyware threat to journalists

The spyware threat to journalists

Steve Coll writes: Khadija Ismayilova, an investigative reporter from Azerbaijan, is an icon among the subtribe of journalists who work to expose cross-border financial corruption. She has broken big stories about money laundering and dodgy banking, despite being targeted by President Ilham Aliyev’s authoritarian regime. Operatives planted cameras in her home in Baku and, in 2012, released a video of her having sex with her boyfriend. In 2014, she was arrested on trumped-up charges that included tax evasion; a court…

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Leak uncovers global abuse of cyber-surveillance weapon

Leak uncovers global abuse of cyber-surveillance weapon

The Guardian reports: Human rights activists, journalists and lawyers across the world have been targeted by authoritarian governments using hacking software sold by the Israeli surveillance company NSO Group, according to an investigation into a massive data leak. The investigation by the Guardian and 16 other media organisations suggests widespread and continuing abuse of NSO’s hacking spyware, Pegasus, which the company insists is only intended for use against criminals and terrorists. Pegasus is a malware that infects iPhones and Android…

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How the white press wrote off Black America

How the white press wrote off Black America

Brent Staples writes: Newspapers that championed white supremacy throughout the pre-civil rights South paved the way for lynching by declaring African Americans nonpersons. They embraced the language once used at slave auctions by denying Black citizens the courtesy titles Mr. and Mrs. and referring to them in news stories as “the negro,” “the negress” or “the nigger.” They depicted Black men as congenital rapists, setting the stage for them to be hanged, shot or burned alive in public squares all…

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Fox News agrees to $1 million fine for violating human rights law

Fox News agrees to $1 million fine for violating human rights law

The Daily Beast reports: Despite Fox News’ claims to have repaired the company’s toxic workplace culture since the firing of founder and chairman Roger Ailes in July 2016, Rupert Murdoch’s media empire has effectively admitted to ongoing misconduct that includes sexual harassment, discrimination, and retaliation against victimized employees, and has agreed to pay a million-dollar fine for what New York City’s Commission on Human Rights called “a pattern of violating of the NYC Human Rights Law.” The settlement agreement, reached…

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When a good scientist is the wrong source

When a good scientist is the wrong source

Thomas Levenson writes: Six weeks ago, a reporter, Nicholas Wade, published what seemed to be a blockbuster story, one that, if true, would expose the greatest scandal in recent history. SARS-CoV-2, he wrote, or SARS2 for short, the virus that has driven the global COVID-19 pandemic, had likely been modified in a lab at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, from which it then escaped into the wild. “Neither the natural emergence nor the lab escape hypothesis can yet be ruled…

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What Biden — and a lot of other people — get wrong about journalists

What Biden — and a lot of other people — get wrong about journalists

Margaret Sullivan writes: When [Janet Malcolm] died last week, obituaries reprised the famously devastating critique that opened her 1989 New Yorker magazine piece, later to become a book, “The Journalist and the Murderer.” “Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible,” she wrote. “He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people’s vanity, ignorance or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying…

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A simple remedy for January 6 trutherism

A simple remedy for January 6 trutherism

Jack Shafer writes: The human appetite for alternative, and usually hair-brained, explanations for why events blossomed the way they did can never be sated. Oh, you can battle a poison fruitcake ideology like QAnon to the point that it can be contained in a 55-gallon drum and sealed. You can repel one nutter idea after another—Obama birtherism, Benghazi, Sandy Hook, the Katrina levee breach, Bush’s foreknowledge of 9/11—a new one will pop up to replace it like a target in…

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Attorney General Garland confronts long-building crisis over leak inquiries and journalism

Attorney General Garland confronts long-building crisis over leak inquiries and journalism

Charlie Savage writes: Government leak hunters have been ratcheting up pressure on the ability of journalists to do their jobs for a generation — a push fueled by changing technology and fraught national-security issues that arose after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Now, those tensions have reached an inflection point. Recent disclosures about aggressive steps that the Justice Department secretly took under President Donald J. Trump while hunting for the confidential sources of reporters — at The New York Times,…

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New Trump scandal shows the depth of his assault on American democracy

New Trump scandal shows the depth of his assault on American democracy

Stephen Collinson writes: New revelations suggesting that the Trump administration abused Justice Department powers to target his political enemies underscore just how far the ex-President went to destroy cherished principles of American republican government. They show that the true extent of assaults on democracy by Donald Trump are still coming to light and are probably even now not fully known. But this is not just a drama about the alleged misbehavior of a former President. Taken together with the Republican…

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An open letter on U.S. media coverage of Palestine

An open letter on U.S. media coverage of Palestine

An open letter on U.S. media coverage of Palestine: Finding truth and holding the powerful to account are core principles of journalism. Yet for decades, our news industry has abandoned those values in coverage of Israel and Palestine. We have failed our audiences with a narrative that obscures the most fundamental aspects of the story: Israel’s military occupation and its system of apartheid. For the sake of our readers and viewers — and the truth — we have a duty…

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Secret legal battle to obtain emails ‘profoundly undermines press freedom’

Secret legal battle to obtain emails ‘profoundly undermines press freedom’

The New York Times reports: In the last weeks of the Trump administration and continuing under President Biden, the Justice Department fought a secret legal battle to obtain the email logs of four New York Times reporters in a hunt for their sources, a top lawyer for the newspaper said Friday night. While the Trump administration never informed The Times about the effort, the Biden administration continued waging the fight this year, telling a handful of top Times executives about…

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Fox News intensifies its pro-Trump politics as dissenters depart

Fox News intensifies its pro-Trump politics as dissenters depart

The New York Times reports: Fox News once devoted its 7 p.m. and 11 p.m. time slots to relatively straightforward newscasts. Now those hours are filled by opinion shows led by hosts who denounce Democrats and defend the worldview of former President Donald J. Trump. For seven years, Juan Williams was the lone liberal voice on “The Five,” the network’s popular afternoon chat show. On Wednesday, he announced that he was leaving the program, after months of harsh on-air blowback…

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Associated Press employees want answers after reporter’s firing

Associated Press employees want answers after reporter’s firing

Brian Stelter writes: More than 100 employees at the Associated Press have signed an open letter calling for more information about the recent firing of 22-year-old journalist Emily Wilder. Wilder’s ouster, and the newswire’s lack of candor about its cause, has caused a rare uproar inside the storied news organization. Monday’s open letter said the lack of communication about Wilder’s firing “gives us no confidence that any one of us couldn’t be next, sacrificed without explanation. It has left our…

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Israel deceives then bombs the media

Israel deceives then bombs the media

NPR reports: In the latest in a series of attacks, an Israeli airstrike Saturday leveled a high-rise building after the military ordered occupants to evacuate. Inside were the offices of several media outlets — including The Associated Press and Al-Jazeera— and residential apartments. An AP statement said all employees and freelancers safely evacuated the building. AP President and CEO Gary Pruitt said the company is looking to the Israeli government for answers. “We are shocked and horrified that the Israeli…

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Has Tucker deposed Trump as the troller in chief?

Has Tucker deposed Trump as the troller in chief?

Jack Shafer writes: [W]ith Trump gone, [Tucker] Carlson has become the most audible mouth in the agitation-provocation space. Like Trump, he labors to produce the incendiary and infuriating to attract attention and the very commendations he found himself buried neck-high in after his monologue. He lives to generate outrage from Democrats and the hall monitors at Media Matters for America. Has the #firetuckercarlson hashtag started to trend on Twitter? From Carlson’s point of view, nothing could be better. Has Washington…

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