NEW YORK TIMES media reporter Brian Stelter greeted the August 20 debut of Al-Jazeera America by gushing that it was “the most ambitious American television news venture since Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes started the Fox News Channel in 1996.”…
YOUR HUMBLE MEDIA critic came in for some media criticism over the summer. Its source: Kelly McBride, a senior faculty member at the Poynter Institute, the nonprofit journalism school that owns the Tampa Bay Times. McBride wrote on the institute’s…
IT WAS an appeal to his political base from a Democratic president mired in scandal. “Journalists should not be at legal risk for doing their jobs,” Barack Obama said in a May 23 speech at the National Defense University. “And…
When the Democratic Senate killed every one of President Obama’s gun-control proposals on April 17, the next day’s New York Times featured two revealing stories. The first was a front-page “news analysis” by reporter Jennifer Steinhauer, which carried the headline…
WHEN PHILADELPHIA MAGAZINE published an article Mayor Michael Nutter didn’t like, he tried to censor it. He wrote a letter to the Philadelphia Human Relations Commission asking it “to evaluate whether the ‘speech’ employed in this essay is not the…
IF YOU’RE A REPORTER at the Washington Post and you aspire to write unsigned editorials, just send an e-mail to the ombudsman. That was the lesson of an extraordinary late February column by Patrick Pexton, the Post man who, during…
It turns out you can deny evolution and get published on the New York Times op-ed page. Dan Slater did just that, in a January piece called “Darwin Was Wrong About Dating.” Slater, author of a book about online dating,…
If hypocrisy were an intoxicating spirit, Andrew Rosenthal would be a master distiller. A few hours after the December massacre at a Connecticut elementary school, Bryan Fischer, an official of the American Family Association, tweeted: “Shooters attack an elementary school…
In his 45-minute lecture/speech in Cleveland last week — which mostly consisted of blaming his predecessors for the state of the economy and trying to turn House GOP leader John Boehner into a Gingrich-like bogeymen — President Obama once again…