Tag Archives: Washington

Yet more thoughts on journalism and democracy

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Newspaper pressesI’ve been pon­der­ing the rela­tion­ship between journ­al­ism and demo­cracy of late, and so too have the aca­demic com­menters gath­er­ing at the blog of Social Sci­ence Research Coun­cil boss, Craig Cal­houn.

Cal­houn asks the ques­tion Sam Zell has already answered — What is the future of news­pa­pers? And when social sci­ent­ists smell blood, they’re mostly rub­bing their hands at the pro­spect of a fresh cada­ver to dis­sect rather than offer­ing sym­pathy or solutions.

There’s not much in the com­ments that reg­u­lar read­ers won’t be overly famil­iar with — foundation-funded journ­al­ism any­one? But bur­ied within them is Michael Schud­son offer­ing his usual top class, ana­lyt­ical two cents: Con­tinue read­ing →

The News Media’s Lessons From The Obama Campaign

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Obama textMy chums — the Car­ni­vores of Journ­al­ism (read in tooth and claw) — are rip­ping apart the les­sons for the news media from the online elect­oral cam­paign­ing of President-elect Barack Obama.

Here’s my mes­sage for the old news media. You missed a rev­enue stream. Auc­tion endorsements.

Don’t be fooled by the SMS and Face­book wrap­pers. This is not the Paypal pub­lic sphere. We’re not all friends and Obama didn’t twit­ter his way to the White House. Con­tinue read­ing →

The Magnificent Folly of Great American News Reporting

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The charge of the Light BrigadeI don’t know John Crewd­son, but I’m sorry he’s out of a job. He’s the sub­ject of this post at the Chicago Reader:

The Nobel Prize in medi­cine was awar­ded last month to Luc Montag­nier and Françoise Barré-Sinoussi of the Pas­teur Insti­tute in Paris for dis­cov­er­ing the HIV virus in 1983 — but not to the Amer­ican sci­ent­ist Robert Gallo.

This res­ult might be inter­preted as the ulti­mate vin­dic­a­tion of reporter John Crewd­son, who in 1988, in a 50,000-word story in the Chicago Tribune, argued that Gallo — cred­ited back then with codis­cov­er­ing the virus — had merely redis­covered Montagnier’s virus, which had been sent to Gallo as a pro­fes­sional cour­tesy. Con­tinue read­ing →

Arguing against Nick Davies

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Flat Earth News by Nick DaviesBritish writer Nick Dav­ies is an inspir­a­tion to a lot of young journ­al­ists, and rightly so (you can read more of his writ­ing on social issues here). But now he has moved from cov­er­ing drugs and crim­inal justice to report on journ­al­ism. And in doing so, he com­mis­sioned some research to back up his cri­ti­cisms and ana­lysis. Con­tinue read­ing →