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With Congress in recess, much of the fight over health care reform has migrated to the airwaves as millions of dollars of advertisements are rolled out, primarily by critics. But how accurate are these ads? Brooks Jackson, director of factcheck.org, says not very. He explains what misinformation looks like.
In discussing national health care plans, reporters, politicians and especially critics have been fond of invoking the failed Clinton plan of '93 & '94. Paul Starr, Princeton professor and author of The Social Transformation of American Medicine, says the history of national health care and its discontents is at least a century old and that for proponents and critics alike, most everything old is new again.
After Fox News Channel’s Glenn Beck called President Obama a racist , the online liberal group ColorofChange.org got 20 or so of Beck's advertisers to remove their ads from his show. But Fox is still getting their ad dollars. Plus, why not just turn off the TV if you don't like a program? ColorofChange.org Executive Director James Rucker explains what the group accomplished.
Last week, Iraqi journalists, publishers and press freedom advocates protested a new law which could impose censorship rules on the media. NPR's Deborah Amos was there. Amos explains the historical significance of censorship in Iraq and what the law says about the Iraqi prime minister.
While working on a piece about what it takes to disappear from your life in a digital age, Wired Magazine reporter Evan Ratliff and senior editor Nick Thompson decided to try it themselves. Ratliff has vanished. Thompson is looking for him. You can too. Who ever finds him wins $5000. Thompson lays out the rules.
News organizations are finding it increasingly difficult to turn a profit, thus making non-profit news an increasingly attractive solution. Jim Barnett has been studying and blogging about non-profit journalism for 5 years and he says new organizations are springing up left and right.
What would happen if a major U.S. city was suddenly without a daily newspaper? It seems increasingly possible these days and so the City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism set out to find an answer. They hired business analysts to create economic models for the news organizations that spring up. CUNY Professor Jeff Jarvis says journalism could thrive without a daily newspaper.
Don Hewitt, who founded "60 Minutes" and changed the trajectory of journalism in America, died this week at the age of 86. Brooke spoke with him in 2001 and so this week we replay that interview.
Highlights from Past Shows
There’s a name for how cruel people can get given a little anonymity on the internet. It’s called “online disinhibition effect” and the resulting venom can ruin your day or worse, destroy your good name. Bob looks at the fraught relationship on the web between reputation, privacy and the law.
Town hall meetings across America this week erupted in raucous protests. Many on the left dismissed the protests as political astro-turfing, straight from the playbook of right wing operatives. But according to The New Yorker's Ryan Lizza, the protestors' tactics are the legacy of left-wing rabble-rouser Saul Alinsky.
On the Media is funded by The Bydale Foundation, The Ford Foundation, The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and the Overbrook Foundation.
