Journalism

Media Can't Bury a Mass Shooter's Name

There's a lot of talk about how the media should adopt a self-imposed blackout on the name and life story of mass shooters. This makes a lot of sense because so many of these spree killers are motivated by a desire for notoriety. The media occasionally omits information for the greater good, such as when the names of rape victims and children accused of crimes are not reported. Just this week dozens of media outlets hid the news that NBC foreign correspondent Richard Engel had been kidnapped in ... (read more)

2012/12/19

Times Responds to Roger Cohen's Mistake

I sent New York Times public editor Margaret Sullivan an email yesterday describing how Roger Cohen borrowed quotes in his recent column on oversharing. She got back to me today letting me know that this editor's note was added to the column: In this column, the author suggested that he was moved to talk about over-sharing and anxiety online after he came across two comments on Twitter. In fact, both comments were taken from a Web site, overshare.com, that the writer consulted as part of his ... (read more)

2012/12/11

Times Columnist Roger Cohen Borrows Quotes

The New York Times columnist Roger Cohen engages in some ethically questionable journalism in his column Thursday about people sharing too much on Facebook and Twitter. In his commentary, Cohen shares this lament: Now I was determined to get through 2012 without doing a peevish column ... but everyone has a tipping point. Mine occurred when I came across this tweet from Claire: "Have such a volcanically deep zit laying roots in my chin that it feels like someone hit me with a right ... (read more)

2012/12/10

Glenn Kessler's Fact Checking is for the Birds

Glenn Kessler, the fact-checking columnist of the Washington Post, often employs logic that's more factually dubious than the claim he's covering. Here's his explanation for why he gives President Obama four Pinocchios for saying in ads that Mitt Romney wants to kill Big Bird: Romney may have been off base in suggesting PBS funding has much to do with the deficit, but that's no excuse for the Obama campaign to declare that means the demise of a popular children's character. According to ... (read more)

2012/10/10

Why Woodward and Bernstein Didn't Blog

I'm a big fan of Josh Marshall's political reporting at Talking Points Memo, but he makes a rookie mistake in a reader email he quotes this morning. MB, a regular correspondent on Wall Street matters, offers this bit of advice to Marshall: I know you raised some money from Marc Andreesen. I would bet Marc's fund and Bain Capital have some investor overlap. I'm sure you've already made that call, but I bet that Marc has no love lost for Romney as Marc is truly in the "job creation" business ... (read more)

2012/08/08

Steve Elling Mocks Overweight TPC Fan

While covering the first round of the Players Championship Thursday at TPC Sawgrass in Ponte Vedra Beach, Fl., CBS Sports golf columnist Steve Elling made a really ugly crack about an overweight fan in the Tiger Woods gallery: A distinctly rotund, lava-lunged woman was following the former world No. 1 all day, and was making no secret of her level of adoration for the 36-year-old. Make no mistake, the players in Tiger's threesome were tracking the hilarity, too, as Woods had to repeatedly fight ... (read more)

2012/05/10

Tech Journalist Quits the Internet

Paul Miller, a blogger who covers tech for The Verge, is quitting the Internet for a year. He'll continue to file stories for the site by pioneering a revolutionary new technique in online journalism: Calling people on the phone. Here's how Miller imagines the phone-driven journalism process working: "I'm going to try to use the six degrees of separation a little bit," he said on Tuesday afternoon in an interview -- by phone, of course. "I have a lot of co-workers and they know a lot of ... (read more)

2012/05/02

Coroner: Andrew Breitbart Died of Heart Failure

Conservative media activist Andrew Breitbart died March 1 of "heart failure and hypertrophic cardiomyopathy with focal coronary atherosclerosis," the Los Angeles Coroner's Office revealed Friday afternoon. "No prescription or illicit drugs were detected," the office announced in a press release. Breitbart had spent two hours that evening at the Brentwood Restaurant in LA's Brentwood district and had drunk some alcohol but "he wasn't drinking excessively," Arthur Sando, a marketing executive ... (read more)

2012/04/20

Andrew Breitbart's Closing Argument

Thursday morning shortly after midnight, the conservative media provocateur Andrew Breitbart collapsed while walking his neighborhood in the Brentwood district of Los Angeles. He could not be revived at a hospital and died, exactly one month after his 43rd birthday. My condolences go out to his wife Susie (the daughter of the actor Orson Bean), his four kids and the many friends he had in public and private life. As publisher of the Drudge Retort, I've followed Breitbart's career going back ... (read more)

2012/03/02

Highway Deaths Amuse Justin Timberlake

The San Francisco Chronicle is running a story on a terrible highway accident in Indiana that killed seven people in a minivan Thursday night. A tractor trailer slammed into the van, possibly after it hit a deer and slowed down or stopped, and only three of the 10 passengers in the van survived the crash. The story is illustrated by a photo of Justin Timberlake and host Matt Lauer laughing it up on the Today Show: As you might expect, commenters aren't happy that Timberlake and Lauer find the ... (read more)

2011/10/28

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