The national media watch group
There are perhaps plenty of lessons in the (most recent) Senate failure to pass even modest new restrictions/regulations on gun ownership. But one lesson needs to be resisted: The idea that passing a more expansive gun control law in 1994 came back to bite Democrats in the midterm elections.
New York Times reporter John Burns admires Margaret Thatcher's legacy. But when he claims she lifted millions to prosperity, does he have any evidence?
"TERROR RETURNS" ran across USA Today's front page (4/16/13) in inch-high letters. Below, the story it referred to had a smaller headline: "That Post-9/11 Quiet? It's Over." Rick Hampson and Chuck Raasch's story began: The blasts on Boylston Street were felt across the nation, shaking and sometimes shattering a fragile hope–formed slowly in the years since 2001–that maybe it won’t happen here. Not again. Then it did. But what happened in Boston that hasn't happened since September 11? All we really can say with confidence so far is that somebody tried to kill a large group of people; as USA [...]
The panicky style of reporting on North Korea doesn't seem to be changing much, if you glance at the front pages of the Washington Post and New York Times this morning. But both pieces, if read carefully, undermine the alarmism–and make you wonder why the stories are on the front page.
Who gets to the top of the journalistic establishment probably has a lot to do with what they think of Margaret Thatcher's hard-right policies.
The New York Times treats Iran's right to enrich uranium as a "claim," to be challenged by anonymous U.S. officials.
The compelling interest in the public knowing that a high-ranking public official has taken part in highly controversial and perhaps even illegal actions, in the view of these news outlets, is apparently outweighed by their duty, as they see it, to keep the government's secrets.
The Associated Press announced a change in their style guide: The wire service will no longer refer to "illegal immigrants," except in direct quotes. The change is a victory for activists who have called for years for journalists to stop using the term.
An Israeli airstrike on Gaza yesterday is being reported as a breach of the cease-fire agreement that was reached after violence last November between the Israeli military and Hamas forces. But the new accounts are misleading: They give the impression that Israel hasn't regularly violated the agreement already.
Former Reagan budget director David Stockman is outraged–outraged I tell you!–by the Federal Reserve increasing the money supply. In a lengthy op-ed on the front page of the New York Times Sunday Review (3/31/13), he condemns "the mad money printers at the Federal Reserve" with their "egregious flood of phony money" and "a radical, uncharted spree of money printing." The Fed's "panic-stricken melee of…money-printing," he writes, is part of "the single most shameful chapter in American financial history." For all this moral indignation, however, he never gets around to explaining what exactly is wrong about "printing money." It's certainly possible [...]
On the 102nd anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist fire, Janine Jackson's article in the last issue of Extra! (3/13) is a sobering reminder that not that much has changed in the last century as far as worker safety is concerned: What should be done to prevent incidents like the January 26 fire at the Smart Fashion Export factory in Dhaka, Bangladesh, in which at least seven garment workers (three of them teenage girls) were killed, their escape impeded by a blocked exit and the absence of the most rudimentary fire safety equipment? The answer for many would be: whatever is [...]
Ten years ago, a front-page New York Times story helped mislead us into war with the idea that Iraq was trying to procure special aluminum tubes for its nuclear weapons program. Last night, one of the PBS NewsHour's two expert journalists to look back on Iraq was the guy who co-authored that piece.
George Will offers imaginary headline to prove his point about liberal media bias. Real headlines, unfortunately, don't back up his case.
