When Meet the Press needed an expert to talk about Syria's chemical weapons, they turned to Jeffrey Goldberg– who got Iraq's WMDs spectacularly wrong.
Dec
07
2012
This Time, Trust Anonymous WMD Claims–They've Got 'Specific Intelligence'
By 45 Comments
The theatrics of WMD claims about Syria–satellite images, anonymous sources and so on–are obviously reminiscent of the lead up to the Iraq War. But media stress that this time–it's different.
Dec
05
2012
Poverty on the Front Page…Along With Other News
By 22 Comments
USA Today's cover story today is a moving piece by Marisol Bello headlined, "For the Poor, 'Recovery' Is a Mirage." And then, right beneath this story, another bit of front-page news: a glimpse of an entirely different world.
Dec
04
2012
Julian Assange, Erin Burnett and the Battle Over Press Freedom
By 38 Comments
There seems to be an expectation in the Assange case that a dissident must take refuge with a government with a sterling human rights record. This message is conveyed by journalists whose own country has detained, harassed and killed their journalistic colleagues.
Dec
04
2012
Think We Live in a Colorblind Era? Welcome to Wet Seal
By 13 Comments
When pundits wax rhapsodic about the "colorblind" era we live in–or fulminate against affirmative action policies as interfering with that "post-racial" state–some of us think of cases like Wet Seal.
Dec
04
2012
CBS, Cliff Jumping and Your Family's Tax Burden
By 11 Comments
The notion, coming from CBS reporter Anna Werner, that come January 1 an average family will be stuck with a bill for $3,500 is misleading–a deception in some sense borrowed from the faulty "cliff" analogy in the first place.
Dec
03
2012
When a Tax on the Rich Is Actually a Tax on the Rich
By 52 Comments
Meet the Press hosted what David Gregory dubbed a "special economic roundtable" on December 2 that included "CNBC's dynamic duo," Maria Bartiromo and Jim Cramer. But Bartiromo's comments about tax increases for the wealthy needed a factcheck. She started by making a familiar conservative point about the so-called "fiscal cliff"– that the White House talks about ending tax cuts for the wealthy, but will not talk about spending cuts: And the fact is that I find it extraordinary that we are zeroing in on this discussion only about taxes, and we do not have this kind of elaborate discussion when [...]
