Matt Taibbi is the latest journalist to join First Look Media, the new operation started by Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, Jeremy Scahill, and others. Since he is not on the national security beat, it reinforces the impression that this is going to be a fairly full service media outlet.
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Journalism professor Jay Rosen has a piece about how much of political journalism has gone astray by focusing their efforts not on educating the voters about what the important issues are but by appealing to those whom they refer to as ‘political junkies’, those who love the gossipy insider game of tactics used by the masters of the game.
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As rumored, the reporters who first broke the stories based on documents released by Edward Snowden have received the prestigious Polk journalism awards for 2013, in their case in the category for national security reporting. As the press release says:
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The organization Reporters Without Borders has released its 2014 World Press Freedom Index, its rankings of press freedoms around the globe and the US has plummeted 13 spots and is now at #46 out of 180 nations, sandwiched between Romania at #45 and just above Haiti at #47. Here is what the report says about why the US declined. [Read more…]
Nobody’s perfect. The fact that actors and writers and other artists may be personally flawed does not usually cause a problem with appreciating their work because we have learned to (mostly) separate the work of the artist from the person of the artist, so that praise for the artistic work does not mean we like or approve of the artist or the lives they lead. [Read more…]
It is rumored that Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, Ewen MacAskill, and Barton Gellman who broke the first stories based on the Edward Snowden documents may get the prestigious George Polk award for 2013, a major honor in journalism. As Matthew Zeitlin writes: [Read more…]
Long time readers of this blog know that I despise the editorial columnists at the New York Times, especially David Brooks, Maureen Dowd, and Thomas Friedman and long ago stopped reading them. Only Paul Krugman has anything useful to say. I thought that my views were not shared by mainstream media people because after all, they are all part of the same system of which these columnists are at the pinnacle. [Read more…]
A friend pointed me to what she said was the best commercial shown during the Super Bowl. I agree that it is a really good one. [Read more…]
Last evening I went to talk given by Robert McChesney, a professor of communications at the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign. He is a prolific author on the media and politics and he was speaking about the ideas in his new book (co-authored with John Nicholls) titled Dollarocracy: How the Money-and-Media Election Complex is Destroying America in which he argues that the idea of ‘one person, one vote’ has now become ‘one dollar, one vote’. [Read more…]