Category

Archive for the 'News Media' Category

How Low is Low?

Quick, to Channel 7’s website! They currently have a piece on women who give out bogus numbers at night clubs. Because, you know, we’ve never heard of such behavior before.

Nothing Like Local News

The redesign of the Channel 4 website is actually an improvement, but there are still some glitches:

Either that, or they’re really serious about rebranding from WBZ to CBS4.

John Johnson

Greater Boston this week brought up the reasonable question of why John Johnson’s passing received so little notice, when the magazines he created and published - Jet and Ebony - were far more influential in America’s cultural landscape than Peter Jennings’ anchoring was. The revolution took place on two fronts. Socially the magazines gave voice […]

Hard News vs. Soft News


Pre-Punditry

Today the Globe has an analysis piece on what effect a Roy Moore governorship in Alabama (if he wins) may have on the 2008 presidential election.
Liberal bloggers are already mulling the implications of Coingate for GOP success in 2008.
David Warsh ponders the implications of Hillary Clinton inheriting an Iraq War when she reaches […]

PBS and the market

I find myself half in agreement with Jack Shafer’s call to get rid of Public Broadcasting, or more properly to stop government funding of public broadcasting.
The best remedy for this week’s public broadcasting crisis isn’t the dismantling of the "objectivity and balance" firewall but the abolishment of the CPB itself. Bureaucracies inevitably conform to […]

Good Cop, Bad Cop

The Metro gives the Herald a taste of its own medicine with an above-the-fold headline about a Herald columnist involved in a shady arrangement with the Romney administration to promote its policies (if this was vetted by the State Ethics Commission, we need a new ethics commission).
Meanwhile, the Globe has the story, but buried in […]

Rolling Over in His Grave

WHDH-Channel 7 has a promo touting an Edward R. Murrow around they received. So far so good. Only the promo juxtaposes footage of Murrow with WHDH reporter Ryan Owens covering the Michael Jackson case. Why mention in one breath and take away in the next?
Of course, this weird juxtaposition gets to the heart of the […]

Extreme Makeover

If you think that Hillary Clinton or Howard Dean are a bit hard to believe when they suddenly get religion, you should see Esquire’s newfound attempt to be hip and edgy. The magazine was never my ideal of what a men’s magazine should be, but the fact that they weren’t FHM was once a big […]

Objectivity and the Fairness Doctrine

Digby has a useful response to those who treat the ideal of journalistic objectivity as a timeless phenomenon:
journalism reacted strongly to the new field of public relations in the 20’s and 30’s by developing this professional code of objectivity quite a while before the cold war. However, there is no doubt that there was […]

Local News and Graphic Design

( News Media and Design )

For those who haven’t seen, the Bostonist, spinoff of Gothamist is up and running. There are still a few kinks to iron out (trackback URLs that read chicagoist.com) and sometimes I feel that the writers don’t know Boston all that well. But misgivings I might have succumb to the success of the site itself. This […]

Globe Spotlight Where Are You?

Since traditional print news media are superior to bloggers in the nuts-and-bolts reporting where phones have to be picked up and leads followed, and since I don’t have much shoeleather or rollover minutes to spare, I thought I’d propose a great story idea to some enterprising investigative reporter: track what actually happens to the materials […]

Blue-State Television?

James Wolcott takes a look at the complaints over Whither Christmas? and says “Wait a minute“: ” I’ve got news: Even here on the godless, liberal Upper West Side, people wish each other Merry Christmas without staggering three steps backward, thunderstruck and covered with chagrin.”
But there’s another bete noire in the culture war: all the […]

Battle of the Alterna-weeklies

While the upstart Herald trying to gain a steady market share from the hegemonic Globe has garnered a bit of attention, Steve Bailey discusses the other newspaper war in town: the challenge the Weekly Dig is mounting against the Phoenix.
Can a soon-to-be-40 alternative paper continue to connect with its twentysomething audience?
Others have tried to […]

In the Shadow of the Silent Majority

It’s Media Bias day among my favorite liberal pundits. Here’s Paul Krugman:
…front-page coverage of the 2000 debates emphasized not what the candidates said but their “body language.” After the debate, the lead stories said a lot about Mr. Gore’s sighs, but nothing about Mr. Bush’s lies. And even the fact-checking pieces “buried inside the newspaper” […]