All Blog Posts from Public Eye
A Journalist? Says Who?
(CBS)
The same goes for legal rulings.
In a fascinating instance, a court's opinion regarding torture and a coerced confession was posted online at a legal blog. According to ABAJournal.com:
A federal appeals court quickly withdrew an opinion issued yesterday in a case filed by a Sept. 11 detainee because of concerns it contained information filed under seal.
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If It's Sunday, It's .... Who?
(AP)
You don't think Bill Cosby. (For the 3,000 broadcast, by the way. Thanks, FishbowlDC) And you really don't think Stephen Colbert.
And yet, there was Bill Cosby this past Sunday – along with Harvard Medical School Professor Alvin Poussaint, M.D. – discussing his new book and America's ongoing discussion of race for the entire hour.
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George Jetson, Media Critic?
(CBS)
Academics, media experts, industry insiders and people called "Futurists" were all asked to look into their crystal balls and predict the media future.
They're together now at the "Envisioning the Newspaper 2020" conference in Amsterdam – no doubt enjoying a Royale With Cheese or two – and presenting their predictions. But you, dear reader with a laptop or at your desk, can find out what they think here.
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Off-Day Filler?
(Getty Images/Al Bello)
But even their great story has its bad side. Namely, baseball writers needing to fill space on a day without baseball.
See, the Rockies -- if they'd allowed the Arizona Diamondbacks to win but one game – would have played last night and the sportswriters would have been talking about Todd Helton or Matt Holliday or who-the-heck Yorvit Torrealba. (No relation to Jessica Alba. I checked.)
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Silence Is Golden
(AP (file))
Just as the dog that doesn't bark in the night can be instructive, sometimes an absence in the media cacophany is worth noting as well.
In a world of Chris Crockers and Britney Spears and Reality TV Wannabes, all conniving and lusting and climbing over each other for a little piece of that pie called fame … there are still some people who just want to be left alone by the media fray.
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Accuracy: An Impossible Fantasy?
(AP)
According to my piece, Ira Glass of "This American Life" and advice-columnist Amy Dickinson – two well-known media types without an antagonistic bone in either of their bodies – took issue with the fact that Solomon quoted them out of context, massaged their quotes and manufactured a conversation quite different from the one they had.
That piece closed:
Journalism is the rough draft of history, the saying goes. And Carl Bernstein called it "the best obtainable version of the truth." I'm good with either one of those bromides. But when it begins to feel like a writer's workshop where you tinker freely, that's when it stops being journalism and starts to resemble creative writing.And now today I find myself being called something of a rube (not by name, mind you) by Jon Carroll of the San Francisco Chronicle, who wrote:
It seems impossible to me that anyone at the Times, or anyone in journalism anywhere in the country, thought of Solomon's interviews as anything more than an amusing fantasy. They read like Nick and Nora Charles batting the ball back and forth in witty repartee. Of course she rearranged stuff, rewrote stuff, telescoped stuff. Real interviews don't go like that. What she was writing were screenplays.Let me get one thing off my chest: there are some writers I read and resemble a bobblehead doll while doing so, nodding along the entire time each and every read. Carroll is one of those writers. So it comes as a particular surprise to this writer that he shrugs off Solomon's tactic so completely as to condescend to those who disagree.
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Reliability Study
(AP)
According to an Australian report of a Technorati poll, most web news consumers don't see a difference between the reliability of traditional media information and blogs. A news article out of Australia reports an official stating as much:
Consumers who get their news from the internet are likely to trust a blog for reliability as much as a mainstream media site, the competition watchdog said today…
"User-testing in early 2007 indicated to those carrying out Technorati's survey that audiences are less and less likely to distinguish a blog from, say, nytimes.com or other mainstream media sites," [Australian Competition and Consumer Commission's Graeme Samuel] said.
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Girl Power?
(AP)
(Blogging trick number 48: Use attractive celebs' names to get your hit count up. Thanks, Elle!)
They did something called an "Elle Beauty Investigation" about the looks needed for women to succeed in TV news. The piece led off with an anecdote about aspiring TV correspondent Laura Wells, who was (purportedly) lowering herself to dye her hair to advance her career. Unfortunately, the piece seems to have been lacking a modicum of truthiness.
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General Attack, Specific Focus
(AP Photo)
Lt. General Ricardo Sanchez – the top military commander in Iraq from 2004-2006, who resigned after Abu Ghraib – pulled no punches in his speech to the Military Reporters and Editors conference Friday.
The New York Times coverage led off:
In a sweeping indictment of the four-year effort in Iraq, the former top commander of American forces there called the Bush administration's handling of the war "incompetent" and said the result was "a nightmare with no end in sight."
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MediaLand Monopoly
(VNR)
She was the topic of conversation due to her comment on CNBC's "The Big Idea With Donnie Deutsch" that Jews need to be perfected, territory well traveled by Eric Deggans down at the St. Petersburg Times last week.
(Much like I did with a story about a certain intolerant religious sect in August, I'm not going to add a news clip to this author's stack by naming her.)
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