Journalism

The Andrew Breitbart Report

After leaving the Huffington Post, Andrew Breitbart has been getting huge traffic on his weeks-old news portal, Breitbart.Com. The Drudge Report links to his copies of AP and Reuters news stories, making his site more popular than Slashdot overnight. Developing ... WorldNewsDaily calls Breitbart a former employee of the Drudge Report, but my impression is that he's currently working as Matt Drudge's double super-secret coauthor. Drudge has been coy about Breitbart's work for years, probably ... (read more)

2005/09/08

It's a Bird, It's a Plane, It's Superuser

The Detroit Free Times covers Michael Barnett, the network admin barricaded in downtown New Orleans who's been publishing a post-hurricane journal called The Interdictor. Barnett, an unabashed libertarian with a military background, has covered the disaster with his blog and streaming webcam while remaining online, which is both a journalistic and technological feat. To my knowledge, his connection never went down. Last night, some of the troops stationed in the city found them: Sometime around ... (read more)

2005/09/07

Kaye Trammell, an assistant professor of communication at LSU, began a Hurricane Katrina weblog as she rode out the approaching storm last weekend in Baton Rouge. She writes in this morning's Washington Post about the experience: We on-the-scene citizens don't mean to replace journalism. We don't have the resources. But we can provide first-person accounts in our own voices of what is happening. Because blogs are so easy to create, they will only grow in number, and many will be covering crises ... (read more)

2005/09/03

Reading this Katrina weblog entry reminded me that Hurricane Andrew in 1992 was one of only three category 5 hurricanes to make landfall in the U.S. in the last century. My wife M.C. Moewe covered that monster storm for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. She interrupted a Disney World vacation with her parents, driving to South Florida in time to experience the eyewall passing overhead in the company of local police. For most of the three-hour trip, her car was the only one heading south. Covering ... (read more)

2005/08/29

It seems a little dumb to care about such things, but I'd like to see Elizabeth Vargas or another talented female newscaster replace Peter Jennings on World News Tonight. We've ventured far enough into the 21st century to retire the idea that the voice of authority in this country comes in only one octave. ... (read more)

2005/08/09

Catching Up with the Five of Hearts

I've begun reading How America Lost Iraq, a book by Aaron Glantz, a war correspondent for the liberal Pacifica radio network. Glantz's premise is that the Iraqi people were extremely receptive to the U.S. after Saddam Hussein's overthrow, but their support has been lost because of the imprisonment of innocent people, an inability to restore basic services like water and electricity, and widespread anarchy. The first chapter takes satisfaction in the downfall of Huda Amash, a Saddam loyalist who ... (read more)

2005/07/27

The defenders of Bush's leaky brain are getting desperate: My only comfort is that probably about 80% or more of the American people don't know who Karl Rove is. And probably 90% or even more don't know who Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame are. Remember, only about 20-25% can name even one Supreme Court [justice]. This was written by Betsy Newmark, an Advanced Placement teacher of U.S. government and politics at a North Carolina high school. How many Americans knew Archibald Cox's name in 1973, ... (read more)

2005/07/12

The San Francisco Chronicle finds someone who claims to have been an Adidam devotee with Joan Felt: ... they had spent some wild times as devotees of onetime Marin County spiritual sect leader Da Free John, a.k.a. Bubba Free John, a.k.a. Dau Loloma, a.k.a. Da Love-Ananda, a.k.a. Franklin Jones. Hales remembered Joan Felt talking freely about her association with Da Free John, the son of a Long Island window salesman who claimed to be an "incarnation of God" and whose nine wives included a ... (read more)

2005/06/21

Wikipedia's a Sticky Wicket

The neutrality and factual accuracy of this article on Wikipedia are disputed. The Los Angeles Times gave up its wikitorial experiment after three days. Someone got their goat by adding one of the web's most infamous gross-out photos to the site. Jeff Jarvis defends the honor of wikis, blaming the Times: They didn't get that wikis are a collaborative medium where, even when people disagree, they try to find common ground, knowing there can be only one outcome, or else the wiki will, by its ... (read more)

2005/06/21

Deep Daughter's Past Illuminated

A front-page story in Sunday's Washington Post examined Deep Throat daughter Joan Felt's association with Adidam: Joan Felt is a devotee of an unusual and controversial self-proclaimed guru who, in two California lawsuits and several public statements 20 years ago, was accused of sexual abuse, slavery, false imprisonment, assault and brainwashing that was said to include persuading people to give him all their money. Asked about the guru today, Joan Felt says, "None of this has anything to do ... (read more)

2005/06/13

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