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President Bush returned this week from the Middle East, where he toured with a three-point agenda: peace, Iran and oil. According to The Week's Susan Caskie, editorials from the region were all in agreement – thumbs down.
Both Iran and the U.S. released doctored videos recently of a January 6th confrontation in the Strait of Hormuz. The Washington Post's Bill Arkin says the awkwardly produced videos, plus a prankster called the ‘Filipino monkey,’ have overshadowed the real story in the media.
Presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich sued MSNBC after the station uninvited him from this week's Democratic debate in Las Vegas. Siding with the Ohio congressman, a judge threatened to block the debate from airing - but the Nevada Supreme Court reversed the decision. Rep. Kucinich explains why he disagrees.
In Britain, where political apathy is as ubiquitous as Earl Grey, the media are awash in American politics. Daily Telegraph columnist Janet Daley says that despite the “supercilious skepticism of the BBC to genuine popular democracy,” Britons are transfixed.
Paying a source for interviews is one of journalism’s most grievous sins. But in this month’s Columbia Journalism Review, journalist and NYU professor Robert Boynton argues that for some reporters, whether or not to pay a source is a much more complicated calculation.
A study out this week found that manufacturers of antidepressants are publishing their successful clinical trials and burying their failures. For those that rely on antidepressants this is another reason to feel bad, but medical reporter Jeanne Lenzer explains why Pharma's selective memory has potential side effects for anyone taking medication.
For better or worse, reporters change the lives of the people they write about. For twenty years, New York Times Op-Ed Columnist Roger Cohen believed that one of his stories had changed lives for the better. This year he discovered that he may have been wrong. Roger Cohen tells the story.
Highlights from Past Shows
With a tricky definition and a lag-time to compile statistics, it may take up to a year to know if we are indeed in a recession right now. In the meantime, the media speculate. Critics from the left and right weigh in on whether the media jump the gun by invoking the R-word and David Wessel, economics editor for the Wall Street Journal, explains the word's place in the newsroom.
Journalists covering the 2008 presidential race have spent the past year-and-a-half obsessing over every incremental development. But after Thursday's caucus in Iowa they can finally respond to actual voting. Mark Jurkowitz of the Project for Excellence in Journalism took a look at some of the coverage.
On the Media is funded by The Bydale Foundation, The Ford Foundation, The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and the Overbrook Foundation.
