Journalism

Bias Against Bicyclists and Pedestrians When Cars Hit Them

Dartmouth coach Buddy Teevens in 2019 Dartmouth head football coach Buddy Teevens was seriously injured when a truck struck his bicycle Thursday night on State Road A1A in Crescent Beach near St. Augustine. The news story in the St. Augustine Record demonstrates something I've been noticing in the media lately -- the bias that bicycles and pedestrians are probably to blame when vehicles hit them: Teevens, 66, was crossing at 6100 State Road A1A at around 8:40 p.m. when he was hit by a ... (read more)

2023/03/21

How to Declare Your Conflicts of Interest

The book blogger Edward Champion has written one of the greatest conflict of interest declarations of all time: I have no connection with any of these authors. The only conflict of interest here involves one of the books being edited by a loathsome liar and rumormongering backstabber whom I strongly detest. He has pushed many kind heads beneath the undertow for careerist purposes and, despite leading a smear campaign accusing bloggers of unethical journalism many years ago, he has evinced pure ... (read more)

2022/10/21

Someone to Watch Over Mimi Rogers

Today is Mimi Rogers' birthday. I interviewed her in 1987 for the UT-Arlington student newspaper during her press tour for the movie Someone to Watch Over Me. It was at her hotel in Dallas with four other reporters. She had married Tom Cruise earlier that year. As the rest of us asked questions about the movie, one of the other reporters only wanted to ask questions such as "What is it like to be married to Tom Cruise?" and "What is it like to look up at a movie screen and see the giant face ... (read more)

2021/01/17

Getting Started with OpenFuego News Bot

OpenFuego is an open source bot from the Nieman Journalism Lab that curates a news feed using 10-15 Twitter users in a desired topic area. The people those users follow are monitored to determine the links that are most interesting to them and a database is created that can be a backend for other sites and services. The software powers Fuego, a web site and Twitter feed of journalism-related links. I want to run a Twitter bot that shares new software and programming links. Today I downloaded ... (read more)

2018/07/18

Stephen Glass Couldn't Get Away with It Today

The 2003 movie Shattered Glass stars Hayden Christensen as Stephen Glass and tells the story of how he was exposed as one of the biggest frauds in the history of American journalism. I caught the film for the first time recently on HBO. I followed the events of the film closely when they occurred in 1998. I liked that Glass was caught by an online reporter, Adam Penenberg at Forbes Digital Tool, with help from colleagues Om Malik and others. Back then it was not respected to report for a web ... (read more)

2018/03/27

News Sites Try to Load Malware from Eclampsialemontree.net

For the last four days, my anti-virus software has been blocking a possible virus when I visit some popular news sites. The URL flagged as a virus is a subdomain of eclampsialemontree.net that has a long string of random characters and looks highly suspicious. A report on VirusTotal indicates two anti-virus providers are blacklisting that domain as a malware site. The latest site where I encountered this virus alert was a story on Stars and Stripes. I'm not embedding a link for obvious reasons, ... (read more)

2016/05/30

Jake Tapper Asks Trump 7 Straight Horse Race Questions

I began watching the Sunday talk shows again last weekend because of Antonin Scalia's death, which propelled the U.S. into an exceptional time in our history. We'll be living with the consequences of how the next Supreme Court appointment is made for a long time. Watching one of the shows today reminded me of how terrible political reporting on television can be. On CNN's State of the Union, host Jake Tapper asked Donald Trump 10 questions: Mr. Trump, congratulations on your victory. What do ... (read more)

2016/02/21

Orlando Sentinel Disappears Column on George Zimmerman

The Orlando Sentinel has dropped into the memory hole a commentary published Friday evening that called for the community to stand its ground against George Zimmerman. The piece, written by sports columnist George Diaz and titled "Time for Zimmerman to pull a Casey Anthony and vanish," was published at 5:43 p.m. and archived by Google two minutes later. As of 10 a.m. Saturday morning the commentary was gone with no explanation. Zimmerman, who killed unarmed teen Trayvon Martin in Sanford, ... (read more)

2015/05/16

M.C. Moewe and the Story That Got Away

You know how on cop shows there's often a veteran detective who can't let go of an unsolved case for years? My wife M.C. Moewe has been like that because of a story she reported that no publication will touch. She's a former investigative reporter who worked at the Daytona Beach News-Journal, Fort Worth Star-Telegram and other newspapers. Around a decade ago a big assignment was dropped on her desk: Family courts were giving custody of kids to a parent accused of sexual abuse and denying ... (read more)

2014/07/14

Mister Mystery: Why Papers Keep Using Honorifics

This paragraph in a Wall Street Journal story on Lance Armstrong does a nice job of demonstrating why I hate the use of honorifics such as "Mr." on second reference in news stories: Mr. Armstrong's Austin lawyer, Mr. Herman, called Mr. Tygart and offered to dispatch Mr. Armstrong's legal team to Colorado to meet with him. Mr. Tygart said he wanted Mr. Armstrong to come. When Mr. Herman pushed back, Mr. Tygart called the meeting off. This practice has been dying out in American newspapers, but ... (read more)

2013/01/15

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