NewsTrust - All Rated Stories

NewsTrust on Fact-Checking and the Wisdom of Crowds

Thu, 25 Aug 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Atlantic Monthly - By Walter Frick - Aug. 25 (Interview) - Truthsquad is a new pro-am fact-checking service we are developing with the Center for Public Integrity, to help journalists and citizens separate fact from fiction together. We are combining the best practices of crowdsourcing with the knowledge of a large nonprofit newsroom and the reach of major news partners. This unique approach empowers citizens to collaborate with journalists to investigate controversial statements from politicians and newsmakers. Participants are invited to post questionable claims online, research factual evidence supporting or opposing these claims, and verify their accuracy as a community, with professional oversight.

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The Chart That Should Accompany All Discussions of the Debt Ceiling

Mon, 25 Jul 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Atlantic Monthly - By James Fallows - Jul. 25 (Opinion) - You can be against deficits. You can be for preserving tax cuts. You cannot be for both -- logically, that is.

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How Britain's Guardian is Making Journalism History

Tue, 12 Jul 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Atlantic Monthly - By Peter Osnos, Clive Priddle - Jul. 12 (Opinion) - From WikiLeaks to News of the World's closure, the trust-owned newspaper has shifted how Britons see the role of the media

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Meltdown: What Really Happened at Fukushima?

Sun, 03 Jul 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Atlantic Monthly - By Jake Adelstein, David McNeill - Jul. 03 (News) - It’s been one of the mysteries of Japan’s ongoing nuclear disaster: How much of the damage did the March 11 earthquake inflict on Fukushima Daiichi’s reactors in the 40 minutes before the devastating tsunami arrived? The stakes are high: If the quake alone structurally compromised the plant and the safety of its nuclear fuel, then every other similar reactor in Japan is at risk.

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The Trump Rule: His History of Sexism

Sat, 30 Apr 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Atlantic Monthly - By Ujala Sehgal - Apr. 30 (Opinion) - Fresh off the allegations that Donald Trump's various "birther" and affirmative action conspiracies about President Obama were racist, now the spotlight is being shone on Trump's long history of sexist, if not downright sleazy, comments about women.

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Today's (Needless) Hysteria: the S&P Panic

Tue, 19 Apr 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Atlantic Monthly - By James Fallows - Apr. 19 (Opinion) - I know that markets run on fear, greed, instinct, and panic as much as on logic. But seriously, how could this non-story have dominated the news today? See if you can guess, from the NYT chart below, when the S&P announcement came out.

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The Brave and Serious Mr. Ryan

Sat, 09 Apr 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Atlantic Monthly - By James Fallows - Apr. 09 (Opinion) - I mentioned earlier that if asked to choose an adjective to describe the budget plan presented by Rep. Paul Ryan, I would suggest "partisan" or "gimmicky," as opposed to "serious" or "brave." Most budget proposals are both partisan and gimmicky, so this is no particular knock against Rep. Ryan. But it's worth mentioning because so much of the pundit-sphere (excluding the Atlantic's Derek Thompson) has received the plan as a dramatic step forward in clear thinking about our fiscal future. I think this view is wrong, and that we'll look back on this episode mainly to marvel at what it shows about pundit-world swoon (Paul Krugman's mot juste today), and about clever policy marketing by Ryan, rather than for what it clarifies about budgetary realities.

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Obama's First New War

Sun, 20 Mar 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Atlantic Monthly - By Marc Ambinder - Mar. 20 (News Analysis) - As a fleet of French airplanes lacerated a column of Libyan army vehicles near Benghazi on Saturday, President Obama stuck to his prearranged schedule in Brazil, receiving whispered updates from his aides. Within three hours, more than 100 cruise missiles had hit two dozen targets in Libya. That's just "the first phase," William Gortney, the director of the Joint Staff, told reporters.

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Learning to Love the (Shallow, Divisive, Unreliable) New Media

Wed, 16 Mar 2011 10:25:51 -0700

Atlantic Monthly - By James Fallows - Mar. 16 (Opinion) - Consumer-obsessed, sensationalist, and passionate about their work, digital upstarts are undermining the old media—and they may also be pointing the way to a brighter future.

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Earthquake in Japan

Fri, 11 Mar 2011 00:00:00 -0800

Atlantic Monthly - By Alan Taylor - Mar. 11 (News) - A massive 8.9-magnitude quake hit northeast Japan on Friday, causing dozens of deaths, more than 80 fires, and a 10-meter (33-ft) tsunami along parts of the country's coastline. Homes were swept away and damage is extensive. As more images of this historic event become available, they will be added below.

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Why Fire Teachers?

Tue, 08 Mar 2011 00:00:00 -0800

Atlantic Monthly - By Megan McArdle - Mar. 08 (Opinion) - I think there are some jobs that are too important to let any consideration intrude other than the best way to get the job done. Nuclear power plants, firefighters, poison control--I don't want to let other social goals, no matter how laudable, hamper their mission. Teaching is one of those jobs.

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Generously Angry

Wed, 19 Jan 2011 00:00:00 -0800

Atlantic Monthly - By Andrew Sullivan - Jan. 19 (Opinion) - What worries me about the otherwise laudatory goal of greater civility after Tucson is that we do not lose either anger or the ability to channel that anger generously for the sake of the greater good.

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The Rise of the New Global Elite

Fri, 14 Jan 2011 00:00:00 -0800

Atlantic Monthly - By Chrystia Freeland - Jan. 14 (News Analysis) - If you happened to be watching NBC on the first Sunday morning in August last summer, you would have seen something curious. There, on the set of Meet the Press, the host, David Gregory, was interviewing a guest who made a forceful case that the U.S. economy had become “very distorted.” In the wake of the recession, this guest explained, high-income individuals, large banks, and major corporations had experienced a “significant recovery”; the rest of the economy, by contrast—including small businesses and “a very significant amount of the labor force”—was stuck and still struggling. What we were seeing, he argued, was not a single economy at all, but rather “fundamentally two separate types of economy,” increasingly distinct and divergent. This diagnosis, though alarming, was hardly unique: drawing attention to the divide between the wealthy and everyone else has long been standard fare on the left. (The idea of “two Americas” was a central theme of John Edwards’s 2004 and 2008 presidential runs.) What made the argument striking in this instance was that it was being offered by none other than the former five-term Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan: iconic libertarian, preeminent defender of the free market, and (at least until recently) the nation’s foremost devotee of Ayn Rand. When the high priest of capitalism himself is declaring the growth in economic inequality a national crisis, something has gone very, very wrong.

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Tears and Rain

Thu, 13 Jan 2011 00:00:00 -0800

Atlantic Monthly - By Michael Chabon - Jan. 13 (Opinion) - Having struggled all the way through to make my own sense of sorrow and confusion congruent with what I saw happening in Tucson, having found that point of tangency at the rueful and admonitory heart, the father's heart, of the speech, I fell all the way out again, right at the end. "If there are rain puddles in heaven," the president said, evoking the words of an unnamed contributor to an album of photos of babies born on 9/11, "Christina is jumping in them today."

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Crisis Of The Public Intellectual

Fri, 24 Dec 2010 00:00:00 -0800

Atlantic Monthly - By Ta-Nehisi Coates - Dec. 24 (Opinion) - academia has, to some extent by its own actions, been cleaved away from public life. I hesitate to speak on television about the Civil War, because there are people who've made this the work of their life--actual experts--who should be speaking. But I also recoil at the notion of a host looking at me and saying, "John Brown--good guy or bad, guy? Go." I imagine those experts feel the same way.

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WikiLeaks Exposes Internet's Dissent Tax, not Nerd Supremacy

Wed, 22 Dec 2010 00:00:00 -0800

Atlantic Monthly - By Zeynep Tufekci - Dec. 22 (Opinion) - Jaron Lanier's recent lengthy essay about Wikileaks is not really about Wikileaks; thus, it is unsurprising that he misses the central lesson of this affair. From the beginning, he makes the fundamental conceptual mistake of conflating individual human beings and powerful institutions, like governments and corporations; he then takes off on a dystopic vision of a world dominated by an imagined "nerd supremacist" ethic of complete transparency, collapse of private life, and unrestricted information flow, in which humanity is the slave of the machine.

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Tax Deal Passes: Great Politics but Lousy Policy?

Fri, 17 Dec 2010 00:00:00 -0800

Atlantic Monthly - By Billy House - Dec. 17 (Opinion) - President Obama may have scored a big political victory with Congress's passage of his $858 billion tax compromise with Republicans. But in terms of policy and substance, renewing a previous Republican president's tax cuts for two years and extending unemployment benefits is not the stuff of legislative lore.

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The Shameful Attacks on Julian Assange

Fri, 03 Dec 2010 00:00:00 -0800

Atlantic Monthly - By David Samuels - Dec. 03 (Opinion) - [The] fact that so many prominent old school journalists are attacking him with such unbridled force is a symptom of the failure of traditional reporting methods to penetrate a culture of official secrecy that has grown by leaps and bounds since 9/11, and threatens the functioning of a free press as a cornerstone of democracy.

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The Dickishness Of The GOP

Thu, 02 Dec 2010 00:00:00 -0800

Atlantic Monthly - By Andrew Sullivan - Dec. 02 (Opinion) - What we've observed these past two years is a political party that knows nothing but scorched earth tactics, cannot begin to see any merits in the other party's arguments, refuses to compromise one inch on anything, and has sought from the very beginning to do nothing but destroy the Obama presidency.

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When Campaigns Manipulate Social Media

Wed, 10 Nov 2010 00:00:00 -0800

Atlantic Monthly - Nov. 10 (Investigative Report) - Politicians and tech evangelists alike see social media as the key to a new type of politics: Campaigns and candidates can better engage citizens, facilitate grassroots organization, and craft legislation with the direct input of a Tweeting electorate. The inevitable results, optimists argue, will be a sort of "digital democracy," defined by a closer, more coherent relationship between the elected officials and their constituents. But social media, like any tool, can be used to erode democratic practices as well.

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For the First Time, the TSA Meets Resistance

Fri, 29 Oct 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Atlantic Monthly - By Jeffrey Goldberg - Oct. 29 (Opinion) - In part because of the back-scatter imager's invasiveness, the TSA is allowing passengers to choose instead a pat-down.

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Lies, Damned Lies, and Medical Science

Mon, 25 Oct 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Atlantic Monthly - By David H. Freedman - Oct. 25 (Special Report) - Much of what medical researchers conclude in their studies is misleading, exaggerated, or flat-out wrong. So why are doctors—to a striking extent—still drawing upon misinformation in their everyday practice? Dr. John Ioannidis has spent his career challenging his peers by exposing their bad science.

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Truth Lies Here

Tue, 12 Oct 2010 17:00:06 -0700

Atlantic Monthly - By Michael Hirschorn - Oct. 12 (Opinion) - How can Americans talk to one another—let alone engage in political debate—when the Web allows every side to invent its own facts?

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The Point of No Return

Wed, 11 Aug 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Atlantic Monthly - By Jeffrey Goldberg - Aug. 11 (Opinion) - For the Obama administration, the prospect of a nuclearized Iran is dismal to contemplate— it would create major new national-security challenges and crush the president’s dream of ending nuclear proliferation. But the view from Jerusalem is still more dire: a nuclearized Iran represents, among other things, a threat to Israel’s very existence. In the gap between Washington’s and Jerusalem’s views of Iran lies the question: who, if anyone, will stop Iran before it goes nuclear, and how? As Washington and Jerusalem study each other intensely, here’s an inside look at the strategic calculations on both sides—and at how, if things remain on the current course, an Israeli air strike will unfold.

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Prop 8 Overturned: The Facts, Not The Law, Matter

Thu, 05 Aug 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Atlantic Monthly - By Marc Ambinder - Aug. 05 (News Analysis) - Here's what you need to know about Judge Vaughn Walker's decision invalidating California's Proposition 8, a referendum passed by voters that banned same-sex marriage. The decision itself will be appealed, and Walker's reasoning could serve as the basis for argument at the appellate level -- or, the appeals court could decide to argue the case a completely different way.

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