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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 by Jon Carroll of the San Francisco Chronicle ...
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.”
Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, who retired in 2006 after being replaced in Iraq after the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal, blamed the Bush administration for a “catastrophically flawed, unrealistically optimistic war plan” and denounced the current addition of American forces as a “desperate” move that would not achieve long-term stability.
Most of my interviews with people in Solomon’s column over the years reflected positive overall experiences. (Several of those contacted either declined to comment or didn’t respond to requests for an interview.) But after conversations with two prominent Solomon Q-and-A subjects—Ira Glass, the popular host of Public Radio International’s “This American Life,” and Amy Dickinson, the nationally-syndicated advice columnist who replaced Ann Landers in 2003—the story became more complicated. Both Glass and Dickinson, without any prompting and in significant detail, told me that in the published versions of their interviews, Solomon had made up questions, after the fact, to match answers that, at least in one instance, she had taken out of their original context.
“[Solomon] rewrites her questions and then applies any question to any answer that a person says,” Glass told me in a tape-recorded telephone interview.
Are more men engaged in politics online than women, and if so, why? These aren’t just idle questions…
We know that women slightly outnumber men online. But at least anecdotally, it seems as if more men are on the political blogs, writing specifically about politics, reading about politics and putting in their two cents in the comments sections. Did you notice how many more men compared to women submitted videos for the Democratic YouTube debate in July? The pool of videos for the upcoming Republican YouTube debate is similarly stocked with more men.
I can see these readers’ point. But “militant” can also mean “aggressively active” or “strident,” and I think many people would find much of the language at their Web site fits those descriptors. One article refers to the U.S. Senate as “traitorous,” which is “putting a gun to the head of America’s national security and repeatedly pulling the trigger.”…
Then what about “vigilante?” Again to the dictionary, which says a vigilante is a group or individual volunteering to promote an interest, or to suppress and punish crime. That seems to me the exact definition of what the Minutemen claim as their purpose.
News audiences are ditching television and newspapers and using the Internet as their main source of information, in a trend that could eventually see the demise of local papers, according to a new study Wednesday.This study hammers home the point that, sure, the media are changing and diversifying. We get that. The alternative media are opening up new doors through streaming video like YouTube (and it’s Ned Flanders-esque rival GodTube), the Blogosphere, podcasts, etc.
"As online use has increased, the audiences of older media have declined," Harvard University professor Thomas Patterson said in a report on the year-long study issued by Harvard's Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy.
After more than four years into the war in Iraq, television news organizations have awakened to their own grim reality: They’re spending millions of dollars a year to operate in a country where security costs them thousands of dollars a day….The bottom line in all this, of course, is the bottom line. Media companies are in a profit business, and if they’re not going to give their investors a steady return … they’re not going to stick around.
And despite the fact that Iraq remains the largest single news story in the world and an obligation for U.S. news organizations, coverage has devolved into a tired drumbeat of insurgent mayhem—and viewers are tuning out. Not only are ratings stagnating, but Iraq reports are not bringing in the new viewers that the declining genre so desperately needs.
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