60 Articles

Thursday, November 12, 2009
Media, Money & Sun Myung Moon
Through an adroit combination of money, media and the consistent promotion of a conservative political agenda, a self-styled Messiah and convicted felon had rapidly reinvented himself and was soon hailed at the White House.

Tuesday, November 3, 2009
Iraq & Afghan Wars: Just Give Me Some Truth
When it came to the war in Iraq, “I should have been the canary in the coal mine,” Alissa Rubin wrote this week in the New York Times. “But like so many others around me, I did not want to believe what I saw.”

Tuesday, October 20, 2009
The Kabul Class of 2009
The “'forgotten war' in Afghanistan, as news outlets had once called it, is suddenly very visible.” NBC News' chief foreign correspondent Richard Engel – who made his name covering The war in Iraq – put it well when he spoke to the New York Times from Kabul this week: “It's like the Baghdad class of 2003 is now the Kabul class of 2009.”

Thursday, October 15, 2009
Rush Limbaugh and the NFL's Higher Standard
(1 comments) It was obvious from the start that Rush Limbaugh's bid to buy into the NFL was doomed. But why do NFL owners hold themselves to higher standards than the rest of us?

Thursday, October 8, 2009
The Human Sacrifice Channel
Alito described his proposed -- and perhaps fanciful and hypothetical -- “Human Sacrifice Channel.” “I mean, people here would probably love to see it,” he said. “Live, pay per view, you know, on the Human Sacrifice Channel.”

Friday, September 11, 2009
Network News Chiefs: The Future's So Bright
(1 comments) While celebrating Murrow and citing Cronkite, network news heads remain in a state of denial about their industry's challenges.

Tuesday, September 1, 2009
Happy Birthday, Mr. Internet!
(1 comments) It was forty years ago today -- the birth of the Internet!

Thursday, June 11, 2009
Patrick Fitzgerald's Private Jihad
(1 comments) "To put it plain and simple," Fitzgerald wrote, "if in fact you publish the book this month and it defames me or casts me in a false light, HarperCollins will be sued."

Monday, June 1, 2009
Rachel Maddow, Keith Olbermann, Ed Schultz - How MSNBC Became a Liberal Mecca
(4 comments) Despite the startling success of Maddow and the recent addition of Schultz to an increasingly liberal lineup that also includes MSNBC's first breakout star Keith Olbermann, getting anyone other than on-air talent like Schultz and Maddow to admit the obvious - that the rising cable net is in the process of re-branding itself as the left-winged equivalent of right-leaning industry leader Fox News – can be difficult.

Thursday, May 21, 2009
Prairie Home Torture Companion
(3 comments) Garrison Keillor claims to be a liberal. He – and we - should know better. Keillor has just joined the already large and ever-growing list of allegedly 'liberal' media figures who either advocate or apologize for torture.

Tuesday, May 12, 2009
Media Torture
(2 comments) As Bowden explained in the formerly august pages of The Atlantic, "The Bush Administration has adopted exactly the right posture on the matter...Torture is a crime against humanity, but coercion is an issue that is rightly handled with a wink, or even a touch of hypocrisy; it should be banned but also quietly practiced."

Tuesday, May 5, 2009
Babes in TortureLand
(7 comments) While speaking recently at Stanford University, where she steadfastly defended the Bush Administration's "enhanced interrogation" policies, ex-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice revealed herself to be a Summa Cum Laude graduate of the Richard M. Nixon School of Government.

Wednesday, April 29, 2009
Torture and the Media
(3 comments) Hell should reserve a special place for those journalists who abdicated their professional and constitutional duties in support of torture in exchange for access and exaltation.

Thursday, April 9, 2009
Times to Globe: It's hard out here for a pimp!
"From the moment The Times Co. purchased The Globe in 1993 it has treated New England's largest newspaper like a cheap whore."

Wednesday, March 25, 2009
The Daily We
The conventional wisdom about social networks is that people filter out dissonant news and opinions, and instead flood themselves with news and views that merely confirm their prejudices. But new evidence suggests that in seeking information online, just the opposite happens.

Thursday, March 19, 2009
Why Media Brands Can't Be Trusted
Internet users put considerable trust in search engines as the online equivalent of traditional gatekeepers. But most are not even aware that sponsors pay for their links or that most search engines do no verification whatsoever of the information links they offer.

Tuesday, March 10, 2009
Brands, Credibility and Cesspools
(2 comments) Google CEO Eric Schmidt believes the Internet is a "cesspool" of false information, and that filters are needed to help sort through the muck and mire. Predictably, corporate executives like Schmidt offer their corporate "brands" as the answer

Wednesday, March 4, 2009
Public Displays of Connection
(2 comments) A still-growing body of academic research supports the notion that online networks (such as Facebook or Slashdot, to name just two) actually make finding and sharing credible news and information more possible than it was in the previous era of legacy media.

Tuesday, February 24, 2009
The New Breed of New Media Researchers
"Previous theories about social networks are wrong," Fogg states forthrightly. "Because earlier researchers don't get what is happening online." He says that unlike face-to-face, 'offline' social networks, online social networks lend themselves to easy group formation. The resultant looser, more extensive social ties then lead to more diverse, and ultimately more trustworthy and credible news and information delivery.

Wednesday, February 18, 2009
Embedded Business Press Misses Story of the Century
Just as our mainstream news reporters failed to do their job in alerting us an impending and fairly obvious disaster prior to the war in Iraq – and then 'embedded' themselves with the very people they were supposedly reporting on during the invasion and subsequent occupation - so too did our complaisant business press

Thursday, February 12, 2009
Word of Mouse
(1 comments) Will emerging media -- including 'viral' emails, blogs, social networks like Facebook and MySpace, and other new platforms such as YouTube and Twitter -- help solve journalism's trust-and-credibility problem?

Monday, January 19, 2009
Twitter Journalism
The first report of the miraculous rescue of 150 passengers from a US Airways jet floating in the Hudson River also provided the latest evidence – if indeed it was still needed – that emerging social media are not only supplementing but supplanting the legacy mainstream media.

Wednesday, January 14, 2009
Facebook Journalism
With slumping public approval, journalism is facing a crisis of trust. We're looking at how people can find and share credible news and information in hopes of regaining this trust. Do you think Facebook plays a role in this process at all? If so, how?

Tuesday, December 23, 2008
Ponzi Democracy
(8 comments) Who was Ponzi, what exactly did he do – and why, nearly a hundred years later, does he and his eponymous scheme still resonate?

Monday, October 13, 2008
McCain Sowing Seeds of Hatred
(1 comments) When Representative Lewis -- a Georgia Democrat and veteran of the civil rights movement – recently denounced the McCain/Palin campaign for its use of divisive rhetoric and said the negative tone of the Republican presidential campaign reminded him of the hateful atmosphere that segregationist Governor George Wallace fostered in Alabama in the 1960s, he was calling it like it is.

Friday, September 5, 2008
Beating the Press-Literally
only in America could a man who has called the corporatized, in-the-tank, mainstream media his "base" -- the media that made him its darling and hailed him for his supposed 'straight talk' -- run against that very same media, bashing it figuratively while "peace officers" were doing so quite literally in the streets of St. Paul...

Thursday, August 21, 2008
The Truth, Jon Justice...and the American Way?
(1 comments) t's not a stretch to ponder whether on-air remarks such as Jon Justice's call for 'bloodshed in the polling places' could one day prove to be the spark that turns such ominous hate speech into real-life acts of hatred – and real people's skulls into – yes -- real red mush...

Friday, July 25, 2008
The Shock Jock Racket
(4 comments) Angry citizen reaction to the latest cynical, cyclical outpouring of hateful speech over the public radio airwaves – top-rated talk show host Michael Savage's despicable attack on autistic children as "brats, morons and idiots" – has once again injected America's talk radio problem back into the mainstream news cycle.

Friday, June 20, 2008
Is the Tyranny of Right-Wing Radio Coming to an End?
(2 comments) Conservative fears of an impending Democratic attack on talk radio - dubbed the "Hush Rush" effort in an homage to top-rated radio talker Rush Limbaugh -- continue to escalate, despite ample evidence that such an assault is unlikely to occur when (as is likely) Democrats sweep back into power in the forthcoming elections in November.

Thursday, June 12, 2008
Talk Radio's Last Stand?
(4 comments) Leading hard-right conservatives, led by their talk radio "shock jock" shock troops, have been worrying aloud about the supposed return of the long-defunct Fairness Doctrine ever since their stunning success last year in defeating bi-partisan immigration reform. The latest salvo is the Newsmax report, headlined "Battle for Talk Radio: Powerful Foes Want to End the Gabfest," which cleverly combines the usual talk radio tropes.

Monday, June 9, 2008
Laura Ingraham: Right-Wing Radio's High Priestess of Hate
(2 comments) Laura Ingraham -- the only women among the top conservative radio talk show hosts, or 'shock jocks" -- is profiled in this excerpt from my new book "Shock Jocks: Hate Speech & Talk Radio."

Friday, May 23, 2008
The Most Savage Shock Jock of All
(1 comments) Who is Michael Savage? On its surface the question seems obvious: he's a 66-year-old nationally syndicated conservative talk radio host whose program, The Savage Nation, airs five days a week from its home base of KNEW in San Francisco. He's a former MSNBC cable television talk host who was fired after four months on the job after he told a phone caller, "You should only get AIDS and die, you pig."

Wednesday, March 5, 2008
Working the Refs
Hillary won this week by working the refs. By constantly complaining about coverage, and relentlessly focusing on charges that the news media has favored Barack Obama and treated him far more gently than herself, Hillary was finally able to staunch the bleeding and stage a desperately needed, last minute comeback that will keep her in the game

Saturday, February 2, 2008
The Not-So-Great Debate
Hillary won by not losing – and Obama lost by not winning. Simply appearing presidential-he certainly has grown into at least looking the part - wasn't, and isn't, enough to put him over the top. In order to continue his momentum and vault into the lead, he needed to show that there are large differences between him and Hillary on crucial issues – and other than on Iraq, he failed to do so.

Wednesday, January 30, 2008
First Black President?
(3 comments) Remember back in the last century, when Toni Morrison playfully dubbed Bill Clinton our first "Black President?" Back then, it was considered cool to have a "black president" - as long as he was really white, of course! But how will the race card play in the high stakes presidential poker game now doubling down, when hidden decisions taken in darkness center on the real possibility of a real "first black president?"

Friday, January 4, 2008
They Report, They Decide?
Should Big Media decide for the rest of us who is - and more importantly who is not - a viable candidate for president? It's bad enough that thus far the reporting of this year's quadrennial presidential pursuit has been even more insubstantial than ever, focused on the horse race, the fundraising, the polls, the pundits, the haircuts and assorted other bits of silliness –- anything other than actual issues...

Friday, December 21, 2007
Time to Cover Up?
(3 comments) Is Time magazine's "full" and "complete" transcript of its "Person of the Year" interview with Vladimir Putin a fraudulent cover up? It appears so. A glaring factual error was apparently edited out of the transcript in an attempt to spare top executives embarrassment over an exchange at the beginning of the recent chat between the Russian leader and Time.Inc editor in chief John Huey, Time managing editor Richard Stengel and d

Thursday, December 20, 2007
Good News, Bad News
In this age of media scams and scandals, of paid opinion and information warfare, of partisan power plays and the corrupt nexus of Big Media and Big Politics, how and where can we find quality news and information we can trust?

Saturday, November 17, 2007
The Imus Enablers Are Back
(2 comments) It didn't take long for the Don Imus enablers to re-emerge. Just months after the racist, sexist and homophobic shock jock was fired for his on-air characterization of the Rutgers University women's basketball team as "nappy-headed ho's" - and less than two weeks after Citadel Broadcasting announced his return to radio -– the Big Media and Big Politics elite are crawling out of the woodwork to embrace Imus all over again.

Saturday, November 3, 2007
Imus Returns
(4 comments) Now, to no one's surprise, the self-styled "I-Man" is back, courtesy of the Citadel Broadcasting Corporation, which has announced that Imus will return to radio December 3 during morning drive time on WABC-AM in New York -- the same city where he was unceremoniously banished from the airwaves last spring.

Wednesday, October 17, 2007
The Media Conscience of a Liberal
(3 comments) Rory O'Connor sits down with one of America's top economists, Paul Krugman, who also happens to be one of the country's leading opinion columnists. Krugman's opinions about the media may surprise you..

Tuesday, July 3, 2007
OhourNews
(1 comments) Can citizen journalism really change the world? Many skeptics still doubt it can even change the news industry, and still question, despite much evidence, whether ordinary citizens can really function as journalists. But why not?

Saturday, June 16, 2007
Mirror, Mirror
It may sound like a fairy tale, but it's true: when reporters and editors at a small Idaho newspaper held a mirror up to their community and exposed rampant pedophilia, they paid a heavy price at first. But their courageous journalism eventually paid off, as circulation skyrocketed, and their paper is now among the nation's faster growing dailies.

Thursday, May 17, 2007
How to End the Reign of Shock Jocks
(15 comments) Those who would like to see an end to racist, sexist and homophobic remarks by so-called 'shock jocks" such as Don Imus or Opie and Anthony should pressure the mainstream media corporations that hire and promote them, as well as the sponsors who advertise on the programs.

Tuesday, May 1, 2007
The Price of Press Freedom
(1 comments) Thursday is World Press Freedom Day, a day when all of us – citizens, media professionals, governments, non-governmental organizations and what has come to be known as "civil society" - should remember and celebrate the crucial role a free press plays in democracy and development.

Thursday, April 12, 2007
Buy Bigelow, Fight Bigotry
The corporate overlords at CBS and NBC won't fire Imus unless they have to for financial reasons. So let's support the sponsors who have pulled out, and lean on the ones who haven't ... yet.

Friday, April 6, 2007
Ken Burns, You're Better Than That!
How did Ken Burns and PBS manage to construct a multi-hour, nationally broadcast series of public television about World War II without including any interviews with Hispanic American veterans?

Tuesday, March 27, 2007
Time to Change The Back Channel
Sunday's NY Times Magazine cover story by Max Frankel is the most recent and stunning example of the Times' weird worldview. The paper's former executive editor concludes that "the real lesson" of the recent Scooter Libby trial is that Washington's "black market in information" is an evil necessary for democracy.

Friday, March 23, 2007
Twenty Questions with Conde Nast Chief Tom Wallace
What is reclusive billionaire Si Newhouse really like? Is Vogue's Anna Wintour really the devil? Can the Web save print? The last of the multi-million dollar magazine launches? One of Big Publishing's big players tells all

Friday, March 9, 2007
The Fall Guy
But before the rest of us join in the jurors' "tremendous amount of sympathy for Mr. Libby," let's remember that the sword Libby has fallen on to protect his higher-ups will likely yet prove to be a blunt one.

Friday, February 9, 2007
Libby Trial Principals Should "Stop Hurting America"
(1 comments) Whatever the confusing, calamitous and corrosive perjury and obstruction of justice felony trial of Scooter Libby may be about –- war, power, death, destruction, lies, manipulation, you-name-it –- it's first and foremost a trial of the media, by the media and for the media...or to be more precise, the mainstream media in the world's most powerful democracy.

Thursday, January 25, 2007
Helping Lara Logan
An unusual plea from CBS News Foreign Correspondent Lara Logan highlights the fact that the network television's coverage of the Iraq war still leaves something to be desired.

Thursday, December 21, 2006
20 Questions with CBS News Head Sean McManus
Sean McManus was named President, CBS News, in October 2005. For the past decade, he has also been the head of CBS Sports.This is the latest in an ongoing series of question-and-answer sessions between Rory O'Connor and leading American media executives. Previous conversations have featured CNN chief Jonathan Klein, Fox News head John Moody, Time magazine editor Richard Stengel, and others.

Wednesday, November 29, 2006
News You Can Trust
(3 comments) NewsTrust, a new social news network, is an online way to identify quality, trustworthy journalism.

Thursday, November 16, 2006
9/11: Conspiracy of Incompetence
(3 comments) A new look at 9/11 in light of Peter Lance's new book about bin Laden's master spy, "Triple Cross."

Tuesday, October 17, 2006
Not in Our Media?
Do you ever wonder why our media devote so much time and energy to covering those who produce hate crimes - and so little to covering those who reduce them?

Thursday, October 12, 2006
Time Is On His Side
Time magazine's new Managing Editor Richard Stengel says no to objectivity, yes to ;informed opinion,' and embraces the Internet.

Wednesday, September 27, 2006
The Evolution Of Political Campaign Advertising
Top political media strategists on both the Democratic and republican side of the aisles talk what impact new players, new money, new technologies, more noise and more clutter are having on presidential campaign advertising, and conclude that they have "lost control."

Thursday, September 21, 2006
A Modest Proposal: Let's Declare War
The United States of America has now been at (undeclared) war longer than the entirety of World War II. The war against Al Qaeda has progressively morphed into the War against Iraq, to the Global War on Terror, all the way to the 'early stages' of the Clash of Civilizations. Yet it appears that the entire enterprise is not only illegal but also unconstitutional at its core.

Friday, May 12, 2006
Twenty Questions for MSNBC...
The third in a unique series of citizen and reader-generated question-and-answer sessions with America's leading media executives, following previous ones with Jonathan Klein, head of CNN/US, and John Moody, senior vice president for FOX News.