A Wall Street Journal editorial about the CBS News forged documents affair takes the whole incident over into the realm of the debate over the so-called liberal media. I hope that this does not become that. Dan Rather has a history of being an antagonist of the Bushes, which would certainly raise questions from the […]

…to paraphrase Bartleby. I’ve been intentionally avoiding comment on the 60 Minutes 2 uproar about the forged–or not–documents from Bush’s Air National Guard service. There has been much praise of the “blogosphere” for uncovering this “story.” And while as a newbie blogger myself, I do think that there is merit to that sort of scrambling […]

Ew, never mind. Kitty Kelley overload. A five minute segment, maybe. Three days in a row? Ew. Forget my praise of NBC. Make her go away.

I’m reading ‘The Elements of Journalism’ by Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel for the class I’m teaching. I came across this quote in Chapter one, apropos of what I was saying about the reading public: According to K+R, Walter Lippmann said, “People… mostly know the world only indirectly, through ‘pictures they make up in their […]

Daniel Fienberg supplied me with some more up-to-date figures on Fox’s convention ratings. President Bush’s speech apparently topped 7.3 million viewers.

This op-ed from the Washington Post was brought to my attention. In it, Bryan Keefer, an editor at CJR‘s laudable Campaign Desk. In it, he pleads for a a more high-minded journalism from the more high-minded papers. His enumerated suggestions for more mature coverage–in order to appeal to us younger readers (he’s 26; I’m 27) […]

This is a position I may someday regret taking, but feel that Matt Lauer of NBC’s Today Show has become at the very least a competent interviewer. I base that on his interview this morning of Kitty Kelley, and on his interview of President Bush last week. That was the interview, you may remember, in […]

My Bartleby daily email was late in getting to me yesterday (in fact I only got it this morning). Otherwise I would have known that yesterday, the 12th, was H.L. Mencken‘s birthday. It’s a milestone important to any crotchety press critic. And speaking of crotchety, I also want to acknowledge an objection from Daniel Fienberg, […]

One of my personal highlights from SPJ was seeing Sreenath Sreenivasan, who was never really my professor, but he was the adviser of the Columbia SPJ chapter. He gave a seminar on how journalists can better use the web, but a lot of these resources are great for non-journalists, too. A link to his web […]

My primary newspaper is the New York Times. I feel like I should be morally obligated to read five or so newspapers every morning: the Times, the Washington Post, one or both of the major NYC tabloids, those free papers they’ve started handing out on the subway, the Wall Street Journal, and USA Today. Which […]