I grew up on the edge of the Eastern Intellectual Establishment in a small New Hampshire town among Polish immigrants, ne'er do wells and descendants of the guys who ran General Gage out of Boston in the 1770s. They taught me to recognize and appreciate a hole in the ground. I learned about literature and psychology and such at Columbia graduating in 1964.
A friend sent me this YouTube clip of Father Pfleger a colleague of Obama pastor Reverend Wright being interviewed by a Fox News reporter in late March after the initial controversy over Reverend Wright had received a lot of negative publicity particularly from Fox. If you are in a hurry, you can get the flavor […]
The Second Draft asked me to look into a story by Ray Stoss at Pajamas Media about something called Accountability Journalism at the AP. It’s being introduced by their new Washington Bureau chief, Ron Fournier, over the objections of his predecessor Sandy Johnson.
Stoss bases his discussion of accountability journalism on an article Fournier wrote last […]
NYU media prof, Clay Shirky, has recently published Here Comes Everybody. It’s in the mail as they say, but there is this 40 minute video of Shirky talking about it at the Web 2.0 Expo earlier this year. (Hat tip, John Sumser) The book puts forward many ideas about how the new media environment created […]
The Second Draft asked me to comment on a story they are developing about a report by CNN’s Ben Wedeman on recent events at Nablus in the West Bank. Yaacov Ben Moshe of The Breath of the Beast makes the case against Wedeman and CNN in two posts. The first entitled Nablus, Trashed or Staged? […]
Richard Landes calls my attention to this post at Augean Stables by his colleague Lazar reporting on how a desperate Zimbabwean mother fooled the New York Times by faking injuries to her son and claiming that they were caused by Mugabe’s thugs. They put it on their front page top and center. The details of […]
I love the smell of fauxtography in the morning and I will believe that the Grey Lady is really interested in exposing it when she beats Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs to the punch. Well done..again..Charles and hat tip Augean Stables and to Charles at LGF for the image.
But there’s more. One could take […]
I had the good luck to be visiting friends in Washington DC who told me about the grand opening of the Newseum - a major new museum celebrating modern journalism on Pennsylvania Avenue right across from the National Gallery. Admission was free on opening day so off we all went, but public response was so […]
In an absolutely true to form old media screw up CNN fired an up and coming news producer, Chez Panienza, because they discovered him blogging. He asked the HR flack who canned him here, exactly what he did wrong.
Right before I hung up, I asked for the “official grounds” for my dismissal, figuring the information […]
I was recently happily surprised to see a US presidential candidate - any candidate would do - show an awareness of the nature of the new media environment created by the Internet and in particular its darker side. I ran into this exchange near the end of this Pajamas Media interview of John McCain by […]
Peter Magnusson is engaged in a project to try to pin down Quality on the Web. He points to the crux of the matter thus: “on the Internet, everybody can see if you’re an idiot, they just can’t do much about it.” He does not disclose exactly what he is trying to do about it […]