The Story Behind the Story

Atlantic Monthly by Mark Bowden | Sep. 9, 2009 (Special Report)

With journalists being laid off in droves, savvy political operatives have stepped eagerly into the breach. What’s most troubling is not that TV-news producers mistake their work for journalism, which is bad enough, but that young people drawn to journalism increasingly see no distinction between disinterested reporting and hit-jobbery. The very smart and capable young men (more on them in a moment) who actually dug up and initially posted the Sotomayor ... Full Story »

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Lynn Caporale
4.2
 by Lynn Caporale - Sep. 16, 2009

This is a very interesting account of how two specific events in her life emerged simultaneously, and negatively, in the coverage of Sonia Sotomayor's nomination to the Supremen Court, inspired by the reporter's simple curiosity about how that could have happened. While, as other reviewers point out, the author does discuss the implications for journalism (which would have been more complete if he also had interviewed people who made the call at a couple of the TV networks), the description of how a single partisan, as a hobby, found information that played such a prominent role in the news, and how surprised he himself was at what happened, is informative and thought-provoking in itself, even if it had not had the embellishment of commentary.

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Lynn's Rating

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4.2

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from 11 answers
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4.0
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5.0
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5.0
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3.0
Style
5.0
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3.0
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3.0
Enterprise
4.0
Relevance
5.0
Popularity
5.0
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5.0
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5.0
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