It was one hundred thirty years ago today, on January 3, 1891, that L. Frank Baum published an editorial in the aftermath of the Wounded Knee Massacre that called for the total annihilation of the Native American population. Baum would, nine years later, write The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Read on for Baum’s editorial in the…
The story that might have altered the outcome of the 2004 U.S. Bush/Kerry presidential race. It was fifteen years ago, on December 16, 2005 that the New York Times first published a report revealing that President George W. Bush had, in 2002, authorized a program allowing the National Security Agency to secretly and illegally spy…
Some moments in media history should never be forgotten. Twelve years ago today, December 14, 2008, Iraqi journalist Muntadhar al-Zaidi became a heroic figure to Iraqis and countless others around the world when he stood up during a Baghdad press conference and threw both of his shoes at U.S. President George W. Bush. Neither hit…
It was a century ago that the New York Times first developed its dismal reputation for getting so much about Russia completely wrong. Interestingly, this occurred within the timeframe that it became widely accepted as the ‘newspaper man’s newspaper’, George Seldes noted in his 1935 classic, Freedom of the Press. For the August 4, 1920…
New Knowledge, the social media “information integrity” firm chosen by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence to write its official report on Russian social media interference in the 2016 U.S. election, was recently revealed by separate investigations of the New York Times and Washington Post to also be in the business of manufacturing fictitious Russian online…
H/T to Matt Taibbi for sharing this gem by former NPR ombudsman Alicia C. Shepard, published in the American Journalism Review in January of 1999, which illuminates the quest for ratings and profit that drove the nonstop coverage of the Bill Clinton/Monica Lewinsky affair on fledgling news channels MSNBC and Fox News. Writing in late…
An excerpt from Matt Taibbi’s new book, Hate, Inc. People forget that MSNBC, before it found its current niche as an anti-Trump network, was just a conventionally crappy news organization. In his new book Hate Inc., Rolling Stone writer Matt Taibbi critiques a corporate press which has achieved higher ratings and profits via nonstop promotion…
The suspicions of laymen have never been answered by the press. Newspapers, upholding the right of criticism as a road to freedom, oppose all criticism of themselves….like kings, [they] pretend they can do no wrong. I wish they were right. – Journalist and George Seldes, writing in Freedom of the Press in early 1935. By…
Brennan was the architect of one of ‘the most highly unlawful and immoral practices the United States has ever undertaken’ – the U.S. policy of targeted assassination by drone Freedom of the Press Foundation executive director Trevor Timm wrote in The Guardian that Brennan was “a defender of torture, the architect of America’s drone program and…
Has CNN finally discovered the U.S.’s complicity in the brutal, horrific war being waged largely upon Yemeni civilians by Saudi Arabia? Previously they’ve appeared well-aware of the war, but painfully, willfully ignorant of the U.S. role in it. A recent report on the network may be cause for some encouragement. President Barack Obama signed off…
