Journalism

"Now that the feel-good, flag-waving part of war is over, the real culprits, the commercial-broadcast media, are going to pack up and leave," says longtime war correspondent Chris Hedges. "What they've done is a huge disservice to the nation. They have no sense of responsibility to continue reporting as the story gets more complicated and difficult to report." The result, he fears, is that "we'll see Iraq in terms of flare-ups and incidents, without any context or sense of what's happening or why. That makes it difficult for us to have informed judgments."

The New York Times has published a detailed account of the deceptions perpetrated by African-American reporter Jayson Blair, who plagiarized other journalists' work and fabricated details of stories about topics including the DC sniper and the war in Iraq. The Blair scandal has prompted speculation that affirmative action got him special newsroom treatment on account of his race.

At the Jesse Helms Center in North Carolina, more than a dozen earnest college students gathered for training in how to start their own conservative newspapers and opinion journals and how to pick fights with lefty bogeymen on the faculty and in student government. "By the end of the day, the student journalists were fired up for battle," writes John Johnson, "determined not only to change the tenor of notoriously liberal campus dialogues, but also, in the long run, to alter the basic makeup of the nation's professional news outlets. ...

"Media have been quick to declare the U.S. war against Iraq a success, but
in-depth investigative reporting about the war's likely health and
environmental consequences has been scarce," media watchdog Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting writes. "Two important issues getting
shortchanged in the press are the U.S.'s controversial use of cluster