Journalism

Of Foxes and Guerrillas

Robert Greenwald employs "a 'guerrilla' method of documentary filmmaking, creating timely political films on short schedules and small budgets and then promoting and selling them ... through partnerships with grass-roots political organizations like MoveOn.org." His latest, "Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism," includes "interviews with former Fox employees, leaked policy memos ...

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The List

"Perhaps no list of reporters has commanded such attention in Washington since Richard Nixon compiled his enemies list more than thirty years ago," writes Douglas McCollam, discussing the reporters whose names and phone numbers appear in a confidential July 2002 memorandum from the Iraqi National Congress (INC). The memo lists 108 news stories that were influenced by INC-supplied defectors.

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The Enemy Press

After New York Times reporter Eric Lichtblau wrote a story reporting that the Federal Bureau of Investigation had collected extensive information on antiwar demonstrators, FBI spokeswoman Cassandra Chandler sent around a memo urging agency officials to "please avoid providing information to this reporter," and the Justice Department revoked his press credentials.

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"The Digestive Tract of the Disinfotainment Industry"

"If your calling is journalism, you enter the job market at the same time that that the long and honorable history of American journalism is traveling through the digestive tract of the disinfotainment industry," declared writer Howard Rheingold in his recent commencement speech at Stanford University. "But at the same time, you arrive on the scene just at the moment something broader, faster, and perhaps more democratic than the invention of journalism is emerging. ...

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The Difference Between Terrorists and Wedding Guests

"What exactly did U.S. military aircraft attack in the western Iraqi desert in the early morning of May 19, 2004?" asks Jefferson Morley. "If you read the U.S. press, that question is the subject of legitimate dispute and official investigation. If you read the overseas online media, you will find little doubt that the U.S. forces, deliberately or accidentally, perpetrated a 'massacre' near the village of Qaim that killed up to 45 people, including many women and children.

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Coming Clean at the Times

The New York Times, which published a mea culpa on May 26 for its flawed reporting that helped promote war fever against Iraq, has now published a second, harder-hitting self-criticism by Times ombudsman Daniel Okrent. "The failure was not individual, but institutional," Okrent writes. "War requires an extra standard of care, not a lesser one.

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