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60 Minutes's Chevron pollution story springs a leak

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Columbia Journalism Review - By Dean Starkman - Apr. 16 (News Analysis) - Three years ago, we weighed in on a bitter media dispute pitting Chevron against 60 Minutes over a piece outlining accusations against the oil giant of environmental predations in Ecuador. We mostly sided with Chevron. The 60 Minutes piece took a blow on Friday when one of the main on-camera scientific experts filed court papers disavowing earlier...

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Pulitzer Prizes announced

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Columbia Journalism Review - Apr. 16 (Editorial) - Columbia University announced the winners of the 97th annual Pulitzer Prizes on Monday afternoon. Big winners included: the Sun Sentinel of Fort Lauderdale, FL, which won the prize for public service reporting for its investigation of police officers who drive recklessly while off duty; the Denver Post, which won for breaking news reporting for its coverage of the movie theater...

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The crime that altered India

Thu, 14 Mar 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Columbia Journalism Review - Mar. 14 (News Analysis) - In Delhi, according to the police, a woman is raped every 18 hours, on average. So it is worth wondering why the gang rape and murder of one 23-year old woman there is still resonating nearly three months after it happened.

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Native ads’ existential problem

Wed, 16 Jan 2013 00:00:00 -0800

Columbia Journalism Review - Jan. 16 (News Analysis) - The Atlantic’s big mistake in the Scientololgy “debacle” has been variously described as: 1. Running an ad in the first place for a strange and predatory money-obsessed cult (as opposed to inviting Goldman Sachs to star at a lucrative conference). 2. Not marking it clearly enough. 3. Heavily moderating the comments while other posts aren’t.

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Reuters's OKC gusher

Wed, 16 Jan 2013 00:00:00 -0800

Columbia Journalism Review - Jan. 16 (Special Report) - Reuters's reporting on Oklahoma natural gas giant Chesapeake Energy was some of the best corporate journalism of last year. Its digging resulted in Chesapeake CEO Aubrey McClendon being stripped of his chairman duties and any bonus for 2012 and triggered state and federal investigations into the company's anticompetitive activities.

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Murdoch's straw snobs

Tue, 08 Jan 2013 00:00:00 -0800

Columbia Journalism Review - Jan. 08 (Opinion) - It’s often hard to tell when Rupert Murdoch’s biographer, Michael Wolff, is merely transmitting his subject’s views or whether he believes this humbug himself, but a fairly constant theme from Murdoch-via-Wolff is that newspapers’ problems boil down to elitism. More specifically, the elitism of reporters—smug, prize-mongering, careerist—is really the problem that needs to be solved.

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Audit Notes: Gore gorges, 60 Minutes in New Orleans, Wired

Mon, 07 Jan 2013 00:00:00 -0800

Columbia Journalism Review - Jan. 07 (News) - Read Brian Stelter's excellent coverage in The New York Times of Al Gore's role in building and selling Current TV: In a (2005) meeting in New York, Mr. Gore leaned on Mr. Murdoch for an extended contract with a lucrative per-subscriber fee. The resulting contract guaranteed Current roughly 10 cents per subscriber per month and helped Mr. Gore secure...

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'Survival of the wrongest'

Wed, 02 Jan 2013 00:00:00 -0800

Columbia Journalism Review - Jan. 02 - In late 2011, in a nearly 6,000-word article in The New York Times Magazine, health writer Tara Parker-Pope laid out the scientific evidence that maintaining weight loss is a nearly impossible task—something that, in the words of one obesity scientist she quotes, only “rare individuals” can accomplish. Parker-Pope cites a number of studies that reveal the various...

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The Washington Post needs a paywall

Mon, 26 Nov 2012 00:00:00 -0800

Columbia Journalism Review - Nov. 26 (Comment) - The not-so-gentle ejection of Marcus Brauchli from the top editor’s chair at The Washington Post has cast a bright spotlight now on senior leadership, including his boss, Katharine Weymouth, the newspaper’s publisher, who pushed him aside, and her uncle, Donald Graham, chairman of the parent company’s board. That the editorial change was awkwardly implemented is...

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Audit Notes: WaPo on the Bain thing, deadbeat Forbes, hamster wheel

Wed, 14 Nov 2012 00:00:00 -0800

Columbia Journalism Review - Nov. 14 (Special Report) - The Washington Post apparently doesn't understand just how toxic Wall Street and its even more rapacious cousin, private equity—not popular in good times—really is now. The paper actually thought it might have been an error for Obama to attack Romney over his Bain Capital days: It also looked, at first, like a mistake. Democrats such as former president Bill...

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Bloomberg digs up more on Romney's tax avoidance

Wed, 31 Oct 2012 00:00:00 -0700

Columbia Journalism Review - By Ryan Chittum - Oct. 31 (News Analysis) - Mitt Romney won’t release his tax returns beyond two years in which he was already actively campaigning for president, and the political press seems to have forgotten about it since Romney’s early October surge in the polls. So it’s left to the investigative journalists to dig up bits and pieces of Romney’s tax-avoidance strategy.

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Unanswered questions in the Romney/Bain controversy

Fri, 26 Oct 2012 00:00:00 -0700

Columbia Journalism Review - By Brendan Nyhan - Oct. 26 (News) - Fact-checkers have played a key role in the controversy over Mitt Romney’s role in outsourcing at Bain Capital, but the way the debate has played out reveals the limitations of the genre. First, fact-checks sometimes help create controversies that paradoxically increase the attention paid to misleading charges. For this reason, political consultants will sometimes intentionally make misleading claims in order to increase the amount of “earned media” their ads will attract.

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How could voters still be undecided? Try asking them

Fri, 19 Oct 2012 00:00:00 -0700

Columbia Journalism Review - By Walter Shapiro - Oct. 19 (News Analysis) - They may be the most publicly maligned minority group in America, a subset of the electorate that is ridiculed with impunity by everyone from TV pundits to online columnists. I am referring, of course, to the people who are the butt of the Polish jokes o

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Audit Notes: Google antitrust, the NYT on entrenched elites

Mon, 15 Oct 2012 00:00:00 -0700

Columbia Journalism Review - By Ryan Chittum - Oct. 15 (Comment) - Reuters scoops that the Federal Trade Commission is leaning toward filing antitrust charges against Google for abusing its search monopoly to boost its own business.

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Jack Welch and anti-business sentiment

Mon, 08 Oct 2012 00:00:00 -0700

Columbia Journalism Review - By Ryan Chittum - Oct. 08 (News Analysis) - Former GE CEO Jack Welch made waves last week claiming—with zero evidence—that the Obama administration manipulated the unemployment report that showed joblessness dropping to 7.8 percent last month. Now that's kooky. But it's not too surprising coming from Welch (whom I was writing this post about even before his conspiratorial tweet). Take for example the latest Fortune column by...

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Facing up to the high cost of free news

Mon, 08 Oct 2012 00:00:00 -0700

Columbia Journalism Review - By Dean Starkman - Oct. 08 (Special Report) - Pretty soon, proponents of free digital news will have to own up to the implications of their model. The structure is flawed. To rely on online ads as the sole source of revenue is both unsound in theory, and in practice it's having disastrous consequences in regional newsrooms, mostly notable at the Times-Picayune and other Advance Publications papers...

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Forbes's myth of the Reagan boom

Thu, 04 Oct 2012 00:00:00 -0700

Columbia Journalism Review - By Ryan Chittum - Oct. 04 (News Analysis) - Peter Ferrara, currently of the climate-change denying Heartland Institute and formerly of Jack Abramoff's payroll and the Reagan and Bush I administrations, writes for Forbes that Mitt Romney will cut middle class taxes, no matter what Barack Obama's attack ads say. Maybe so, but since Romney's plan is mathematically impossible, the candidate doesn't get the benefit...

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Audit Notes: "Makers and takers" edition

Wed, 19 Sep 2012 00:00:00 -0700

Columbia Journalism Review - By Ryan Chittum - Sep. 19 (News Analysis) - A big part of the problem with Mitt Romney's "47 percent" characterization, as I wrote yesterday, is that it uses federal income tax to snooker people not paying close attention into thinking half the country pays no taxes at all. That's cherry picking the most progressive part of the tax system to paint a picture of half a country...

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The Post goes south on NAFTA

Mon, 17 Sep 2012 00:00:00 -0700

Columbia Journalism Review - By Ryan Chittum - Sep. 17 (News Analysis) - The Washington Post rah-rah story on trade with Mexico last week left out key context for its American readers. The Post writes that Mexicans are buying lots of American-made stuff thanks to NAFTA, a growing middle class, and retailers like Costco. But the paper does all it can to avoid talking about the flipside of that coin: That Americans...

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The press sours a bit on Apple

Fri, 14 Sep 2012 00:00:00 -0700

Columbia Journalism Review - By Ryan Chittum - Sep. 14 (Comment) - One of my favorite sports as a critic is watching how the press liveblogs the periodic gadget announcements that Apple pioneered as a 21st century model for getting and controlling press coverage. These events involve getting dozens or hundreds of journalists into a room, rolling out what's left of the Reality Distortion Field, and having them type up live mash-notes...

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The Facebook blame game

Sat, 08 Sep 2012 00:00:00 -0700

Columbia Journalism Review - By Ryan Chittum - Sep. 08 (Opinion) - Like Jon Weil, I've got little sympathy for the folks who speculated on Facebook at $38, thinking it would double in price on day one but who instead three months later are sitting on 50 percent losses. Buying a stock priced at 100 times earnings in a company whose revenue growth is slowing sharply, whose costs...

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When factcheckers get trigger-happy

Fri, 07 Sep 2012 00:00:00 -0700

Columbia Journalism Review - By Brendan Nyhan - Sep. 07 (Special Report) - Is there such a thing as too much factchecking? Factcheck.org described former President Bill Clinton's speech to the Democratic convention Wednesday evening as a "fact-checker's nightmare" in part because, "with few exceptions… his stats checked out." Rather than concede that it had little material to work with, however, The Associated Press manufactured a "fact check" of Clinton that focused far too heavily on omitted context and possible counter-arguments to his opinions rather than untruths or errors—and even managed to work in a gratuitous Monica Lewinsky reference that invoked Clinton’s reputation for factual slipperiness.

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In Florida, convention coverage ranges from abundant to absent

Thu, 30 Aug 2012 00:00:00 -0700

Columbia Journalism Review - By Brian E. Crowley - Aug. 30 (News Analysis) - On Wednesday, the morning after the first night of the Republican National Convention, the front page of the Fort Lauderdale-based Sun Sentinel—the paper with the fourth-largest daily circulation in Florida—had not a single story about the GOP gathering. Not even a tease to inside coverage. There was nothing on the front about Ann Romney’s speech.

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Audit Notes: The national debt, Bailout, ProPublica on campaign finance

Wed, 29 Aug 2012 00:00:00 -0700

Columbia Journalism Review - By Ryan Chittum - Aug. 29 (Investigative Report) - Ezra Klein, anticipating a lot of Republicans disingenuously blaming Obama for the national debt, points to a Center on Budget and Policy Priorities chart showing that the increase in the debt comes almost entirely from Bush-era policies: Kevin Drum says, "Their success at convincing half the country that Barack Obama is responsible for our...

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Media reactions to the Freeh Report

Sat, 14 Jul 2012 00:00:00 -0700

Columbia Journalism Review - Jul. 14 (Special Report) - Media coverage of the 267-page Freeh Report on the Penn State child abuse coverup hasn’t stopped since it was released Thursday. The Freeh Report is the result of an independent investigation by the lawyer Louis Freeh into the actions of Penn State officials who worked with Jerry Sandusky, an assistant football coach at the university. The Washington Post

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