Journalism

The media's use of spokespeople as primary news sources has increased 81% between 1995 and 2000 according to a study by Bob Williams, an ethics fellow at the Poynter Institute. "As a reporter, you look around the newsroom, and the tendency has become to talk to spokespeople rather than to even try to get to the principals," Williams told PR Week. Council of PR Firms president Kathy Cripps suggests reporters and editors sit down with their PR contacts for interviews as a way to improve the relationship between the media and PR practitioners.

Today's Republican Party demonizes any criticism of President Bush on the grounds that it will "undermine the war effort," and journalists like Tom Gutting are learning the hard way that they can be fired if they question the president's leadership. Yet one of the GOP's most influential forebears, presidential nominee Thomas Dewey, openly criticized Franklin Roosevelt at the peak of the war against fascism.

Following the murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, Robert Fisk ponders "the slow, painful, dangerous erosion of respect" for journalists who cover international conflicts. "We used to risk our lives in wars -- we still do -- but journalists were rarely deliberate targets," he writes. One reason for the change, he says, is that journalists themselves have lost their status as impartial witnesses to war. "What on earth was CNN's Walter Rodgers doing in US Marine costume at the American camp outside Kandahar?

When it comes to global warming, science writers seem to do a better job of getting the facts straight than editorial writers. University of Illinois scientists recently published research in Nature which shows a local pattern of cooling in parts of the Antarctic. The scientists' published research made it clear that this local cooling does not contradict the evidence of global warming.