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Category: Journalism/Media

Joe Biden and the ‘electability’ delusion — and why the media keep making the same mistake

Joe Biden and the ‘electability’ delusion — and why the media keep making the same mistake

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Margaret Sullivan writes: As Iowa journalist Robert Leonard talks to voters around his state, he finds himself baffled at the national portrayal of Joe Biden’s dominance in the presidential campaign. The local Democrats he encounters respect the former vice president, he told me, but many of them also feel his time has passed. They’re far more excited about other candidates, five in particular: Sen. Elizabeth Warren (Mass.); Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Ind.; Sen. Kamala D. Harris (Calif.);…

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Google made $4.7 billion from the news industry in 2018, study says

Google made $4.7 billion from the news industry in 2018, study says

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The New York Times reports: $4,700,000,000. It’s more than the combined ticket sales of the last two “Avengers” movies. It’s more than what virtually any professional sports team is worth. And it’s the amount that Google made from the work of news publishers in 2018 via search and Google News, according to a study to be released on Monday by the News Media Alliance. The journalists who create that content deserve a cut of that $4.7 billion, said David Chavern,…

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Bellingcat and how open source reinvented investigative journalism

Bellingcat and how open source reinvented investigative journalism

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Muhammad Idrees Ahmad writes: It’s a brief window into a doomed soul. Clinging to his mother’s back, the child looks twice into the camera held by the man about to kill him. The natural curiosity of a child that fear has failed to extinguish. The smartphone captures the casual cruelty with which both mother and child are killed. Nearby, another mother and daughter are executed. One killer continues to pump bullets into the lifeless bodies with a glee that seems…

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The State Department has been funding trolls. I’m one of their targets

The State Department has been funding trolls. I’m one of their targets

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Jason Rezaian writes: Even after spending a year and a half in prison in Tehran, I knew that if I wanted to go on writing about Iran, I would be a target for plenty of public attacks despite the abuse I had suffered at the hands of the Islamic Republic. And so it has been. But I never imagined the U.S. State Department would be funding my attackers. Last week, several astute Iran watchers drew attention to a series of…

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Neither Congress nor the press did enough to tell the American people what they needed to know about the Mueller report

Neither Congress nor the press did enough to tell the American people what they needed to know about the Mueller report

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Quinta Jurecic writes: Mueller has remained silent for two years, and his first public statement was always going to be a significant event. Likewise, the underlying information communicated in both Mueller’s remarks and the report itself is appalling—and further discussion of its meaning can only be good. The question is why it took so long to happen. The difficulty in communicating the substance of the Mueller report began even before the report itself was released. When Barr first released his…

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The U.S. media is in the crosshairs of the new Assange indictment

The U.S. media is in the crosshairs of the new Assange indictment

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Jack Goldsmith writes: I have written a lot on how hard it is to distinguish WikiLeaks from the New York Times when it comes to procuring and publishing classified information. One implication of the comparison is that any successful prosecution of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange would have adverse implications for mainstream U.S. news publications efforts to solicit, receive and publish classified information. The May 23 indictment of Assange makes clear that these concerns are real. As Susan Hennessey said, “[I]t…

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Latest charges against Assange are an assault on press freedom

Latest charges against Assange are an assault on press freedom

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Brian Barrett writes: On Thursday, the Department of Justice unsealed new charges against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. Unlike the previous indictment—which focused narrowly on an apparent offer to help crack a password—the 17 superseding counts focus instead on alleged violations of the Espionage Act. In doing so, the DOJ has aimed a battering ram at the freedom of the press, whether you think Assange is a journalist or not. The indictment, which you can read in full below, alleges that…

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Amend the Espionage Act: Public interest defenses must be allowed

Amend the Espionage Act: Public interest defenses must be allowed

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In an editorial, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette says: It has been almost 102 years since the Espionage Act was signed into law by Woodrow Wilson. Initially conceived as a means by which to “punish acts of interference with the foreign relations,” the act has since become a tool of suppression, used to punish whistleblowers who expose governmental wrongdoing and criminality. It is time that the law be amended to accommodate those who share information vital to the public interest. Daniel Everette…

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In a popular mobile game, players are given the goal of killing a journalist

In a popular mobile game, players are given the goal of killing a journalist

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The Washington Post reports: The mission is called Breaking News. It’s the seventh mission in the game, and it comes after you’ve upgraded your sniper rifle to shoot at a distance of nearly 1,000 feet with accuracy. By now, you’ve already taken out, among others, a gunman who allegedly killed several people at a pizzeria last year, someone who stole a backpack from a tourist, a sniper who (without a trace of irony) is killing innocent people, and three men…

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American journalism is suffering from ‘truth decay’

American journalism is suffering from ‘truth decay’

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Quentin Fottrell writes: American journalism is losing its objectivity. That’s according to a new analysis on news discourse by the RAND Corporation. In the study, released Wednesday, researchers found a major shift occurred between 1989 and 2017 as journalism expanded beyond traditional media, such as newspapers and broadcast networks, to newer media, including 24-hour cable news channels and digital outlets. “Notably, these measurable changes vary in extent and nature for different news platforms,” it found. RAND is a nonprofit nonpartisan…

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Should the media sever their ties to Facebook?

Should the media sever their ties to Facebook?

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Mathew Ingram writes: With all that has transpired between Facebook and the media industry over the past couple of years—the repeated algorithm changes, the head fakes about switching to video, the siphoning off of a significant chunk of the industry’s advertising revenue—most publishers approach the giant social network with skepticism, if not outright hostility. And yet, the vast majority of them continue to partner with Facebook, to distribute their content on its platform, and even accept funding and resources from…

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Major media outlets’ Twitter accounts amplify false Trump claims on average 19 times a day, study finds

Major media outlets’ Twitter accounts amplify false Trump claims on average 19 times a day, study finds

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Media Matters reports: Major media outlets failed to rebut President Donald Trump’s misinformation 65% of the time in their tweets about his false or misleading comments, according to a Media Matters review. That means the outlets amplified Trump’s misinformation more than 400 times over the three-week period of the study — a rate of 19 per day. The data shows that news outlets are still failing to grapple with a major problem that media critics highlighted during the Trump transition:…

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Why the media dumped Beto for Mayor Pete

Why the media dumped Beto for Mayor Pete

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Jack Shafer writes: Burning with the velocity of a prairie fire on a gusty Indiana day, Pete Buttigieg scorched the airwaves, seared the podcasts, and charred the press this week as he ignited his presidential campaign, temporarily torching his Democratic competition in the process. The secret to Buttigieg’s publicity run was no secret, wrote Matthew Yglesias in Vox. Like Molly Bloom in his favorite novel, Ulysses, he can’t stop saying “yes”—to media invitations. In recent weeks, he’s appeared on a…

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How Rupert Murdoch’s media empire remade the world

How Rupert Murdoch’s media empire remade the world

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Jonathan Mahler and Jim Rutenberg write: Media power has historically accrued slowly, over the course of generations, which is one reason it tends to be concentrated in dynastic families. The Graham family owned The Washington Post for 80 years before selling it to Amazon’s founder, Jeff Bezos. William R. Hearst III still presides over the Hearst Corporation, whose roots can be traced to his great-grandfather, the mining-baron-turned-United-States-senator George Hearst. The New York Times has been controlled by the Ochs-Sulzberger family…

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Fox News did their own ‘catch and kill’ on the Stormy Daniels story to help Trump win the election

Fox News did their own ‘catch and kill’ on the Stormy Daniels story to help Trump win the election

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Jane Mayer writes: When [Bill] Shine assumed command at Fox, the 2016 campaign was nearing its end, and Trump and Clinton were all but tied. That fall, a FoxNews.com reporter had a story that put the network’s journalistic integrity to the test. Diana Falzone, who often covered the entertainment industry, had obtained proof that Trump had engaged in a sexual relationship in 2006 with a pornographic film actress calling herself Stormy Daniels. Falzone had worked on the story since March,…

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