Jon Stewart is obviously striking a nerve. Last week, he rankled liberals. This week, the top exec at Fox News unloads on Stewart: He hates conservative views. He hates conservative thoughts. He hates conservative verbiage. He hates conservatives…He’s crazy. If it wasn’t polarized, he couldn’t make a living. He makes a living by attacking conservatives…Continue Reading…
Great column today by Thomas Friedman, recounting a whopper of a story that went viral until CNN’s Anderson Cooper debunked it. This is how you properly debunk a story, or a claim (as opposed to a person). Not by declaring again and again that someone is the most debunked person in the universe.
There’s a decency to Jon Stewart that seems to be in his fiber and which has manifested itself as a kind of professional ethic. This was driven home to me in a fascinating interview he did last night with Rachel Maddow, when, at one point, he said: There’s no honor in what I do, but…Continue Reading…
James Fallows has a cover story on the inevitability of coal in The Atlantic magazine that is a must-read. The piece cogently lays out why coal is king and why it must be made to be clean. The story is already prompting knee-jerk annoyance in predictable places. More on that in a minute. Here’s the…Continue Reading…
In the past year various panel reports on “climategate” and the IPCC have called for greater “transparency” in climate science. But what about transparency in journalism? Jeff Jarvis, a journalism professor and influential media blogger, has been calling for it for years and does so again in the wake of the Keith Olbermann suspension: …self-respecting…Continue Reading…
Talk about someone being tough as nails. Over the weekend, photojournalist Joao Silva stepped on a mine in Afghanistan and was severely injured. He was on assignment for the New York Times. He and NYT reporter Carlotta Gall (who was unhurt) were embedded with a U.S. patrol. Army medics got to Silva within seconds and…Continue Reading…
Ryan Lizza, a reporter for The New Yorker, stopped by the Grist office yesterday to chat about his widely read article on How the Senate and White House missed their best chance to deal with climate change Today, David Roberts provides the highlights of the chat, in which he notes at the end of his…Continue Reading…
I don’t blog about TV journalism because I hardly watch TV anymore. But I know what I’m missing on CNN and Fox News, which David Rothkopf reaffirms with this meta commentary on the Rick Sanchez firing: The problem with CNN is in fact not that they failed to fire Sanchez more explicitly for his anti-Semitism,…Continue Reading…
There are two stories in the current issue of New York Magazine that are of great interest to me, particularly this one by Robert Sullivan, titled, “The Concrete Jungle.” I’m teaching an Advanced Reporting course this Fall at New York University, called Hidden New York: Where the Wild Things Are, and incredibly, Sullivan’s wide-ranging survey…Continue Reading…
Lawrence Wright has a short piece in The New Yorker this week–a commentary on America’s latest culture war. For those not familiar with Wright, he’s the the author of the masterful, 2007 Pulitzer Prize-winning (for non-fiction) The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11. I mention it because last night I happened to…Continue Reading…