MediaLens is a UK organization dedicated to raising awareness of the way the media system distorts reality as a result of the forces of free-market capitalism. Their analysis of things … Read more MediaLens on journalism’s filtering system in action
I’m slow to catch this one, so I’ll just mention it (as an important scholarly paper that argues for the future of paper): William Powers’ “Hamlet’s Blackberry: Why Paper is … Read more The future of paper
Stephen Mitchell of UC Riverside wrote me the other day to ask, Do you know of academic libraries who have done BI on the War? We’re starting to talk about … Read more BI on the War, anyone?
You could call it a bombshell if what the New York Times is reporting now were not already well known by skeptical observers, but it’s significant that the Times is … Read more NY Times reports on media manipulation by Pentagon
Eric Alterman, who writes on the news media regularly in The Nation magazine, has an interesting article in the current issue of The New Yorker on the decline of the … Read more Alterman on Journalism in the New Yorker
The Nation has an interesting review of the new edition of Walter Lippman’s 1920 book, Liberty and the News. This book is about the relation between journalism and democracy, and … Read more Walter Lippman’s Liberty and the News (1920)
Here’s some great library PR from regular San Francisco Chronicle columnist C.W. Nevius. It’s an example of the kind of newspaper coverage that I think we mostly want.
Two items regarding recent mainstream news reports telling the story that Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez is cracking down on free speech in refusing to renew RCTV’s license. First, Robert McChesney unpacks … Read more Venezuela’s media and the U.S. media
Marin County’s free weekly paper, The Pacific Sun, published a feature article in its last issue about the Marin County Free Library and the broader Marin County consortium of libraries, … Read more Now that’s Library PR
Media critic and theorist Robert McChesney is spearheading the campaign against the postal rate hike, which has Time Warner and other major magazine publishers’ money behind it. This is from … Read more Postal Rate Hike would hurt independent publishers
From Al Kagan: One of my colleagues here has encouraged me to distribute this letter more widely, so here it is. It appears in the latest issue of the IFLA … Read more Al Kagan, letter to IFLA Journal on Freedom of the Press, Social Responsibility and the Danish Cartoons
The Communist Party of the United States is presently in the news for donating its archive to the Tamiment Library at NYU. As many are aware, this archive was part … Read more The hidden story behind CPUSA’s donation of its archives to NYU
My friend John Gehner just told me about this watershed piece of investigative reporting by James Bamford, an article from Rolling Stone that won the 2006 National Magazine Award in … Read more John Rendon – the Goebbels of our era
Just briefly mentioning two important things that I have neglected to follow here. 1). The 9th Circuit Court’s rejection of Brewster Kahle’s constitutional challenge to copyright laws that prevent people … Read more 9th Circuit rejects Kahle vs. Gonzales, AAP PR
After his last address on Iraq, President Bush broke with precedent and refused to be photographed at the podium by journalists, instead distributing an official, government produced photo which he … Read more Bush refuses to be photographed
Journalism has changed in the last few decades because the ownership of most daily newspapers has moved from local, private hands to publicly traded corporations, which have demanded higher profit … Read more Return of the Press Barons
We get our sense of where the country is at largely from the media. When elections and opinion polls tell a different story, we have to ask questions about the … Read more Who is out of step with the country, really?
In literature and film, we are drawn into a story and care about it because we believe, at some level, in the truth of the narrative. This requires what’s called … Read more Torture
Today the Reuters news service is reporting on the message of Prince Karim Aga Khan, the spiritual leader of 15 million Shia Ismaili Muslims, delivered to a group of journalists … Read more Aga Khan: Not a clash of civilizations, but a conflict of ignorance…
From the AP story: WASHINGTON – The Federal Communications Commission ordered its staff to destroy all copies of a draft study that suggested greater concentration of media ownership would hurt … Read more FCC study on media ownership ordered destroyed