CJR Magazine

Blind Spot

2008-09-04T15:00:00Z

Over the last five years, as I’ve consumed one dispatch after another from journalists embedded with U.S. soldiers in Iraq, I’ve wondered how accurate a picture of events such reports provide. Given the stark dangers journalists face in Iraq, embedding clearly offers a valuable means of getting around the country and seeing the troops in action—but at what cost?...

But It's Alright

2008-09-01T17:20:45Z

It’s never all right to use “alright,” right? Let’s discuss, already. The Columbia Guide to Standard American English says it best: “All right is the only spelling Standard English recognizes.” “Standard English,” of course, is that which is acceptable in polite company, meaning if you want to be taken altogether seriously. Yet “alright” shows up an awful...

Attitude Adjustment

2008-09-01T16:28:00Z

Like the air that sustains life, facts that would help hard-pressed consumers are all around us. Instead of gathering and delivering such facts, however, we often leave subscribers gasping for useful information. And so their numbers dwindle. Americans tend to consume all their income these days, and sometimes more than their income, which is shrinking. They are in a...

Brief Encounters

2008-08-26T14:00:00Z

Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, The End of Civilization By Nicholson Baker Simon & Schuster 576 pages, $30 This curious book is in the form of a chronicle, a stark chronology in which the author has made himself all but voiceless, thus suggesting that his narrative is determined by deity or fate. Hundreds...

Comma Suture

2008-08-25T18:31:02Z

The selection of Senator Joe Biden to be Barack Obama’s running mate has revived the debate over a statement Biden made to The New York Observer in early 2007. “I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy,” Biden was quoted as saying. “I mean, that’s a storybook, man.”...

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Too Good to Be True?

2008-08-21T14:00:00Z

The decade-long collaboration between the Project for Excellence in Journalism and several academics led by Wellesley College political scientist Marion Just concludes that the more local TV invests in quality reporting, the bigger its audience tends to be. Crime news and celebrity news, contrary to all popular and professional wisdom, they say, aren’t as appealing to TV viewers. ...

It's Your Cull

2008-08-18T19:49:09Z

If you’re a poker player, when you “cull” the cards you have selected a bunch of good cards and arranged to deal them to yourself or someone you want to win. (That’s cheating, by the way.) But if you’re a cowboy, when you ride out to “cull” the herd, you’re looking for the sick or weak animals to cut out....

He Likes Ike?

2008-08-18T17:45:42Z

In many ways, Robert Scheer’s career encapsulates the long march of progressive journalism in postwar America. After an early stint at Ramparts, he moved from Playboy to the Los Angeles Times (from which he was defenestrated in 2005, after nearly three decades at the paper). More recently, he has co-founded an online magazine, Truthdig.com, and published a collection of...

Interpret the World

2008-08-14T18:37:14Z

On a dreary day in October 1922, a young man from Pana, a small town in southern Illinois, walked into the Paris office of the Chicago Tribune. In experience, he scarcely came up to the knee of most journalists. There had been a stint at the Chicago Daily News, from which he was fired; a few months covering scandal...

Darts & Laurels

2008-08-12T14:00:00Z

Dart to the television news industry, for a shameful nonresponse to serious questions about their vetting of analysts hired to comment on the invasion of Iraq and other military matters. On April 20, The New York Times published David Barstow’s eye-opening investigation into a Defense Department program designed to influence the influencers. In 2002-2003, as the Bush administration...

When Loosing Is Winning

2008-08-11T19:03:04Z

A lot of people seem to be loosing their minds lately, or at least their grips on their dictionaries. “Loosing teeth, but keeping faith” read one headline. It’s possible the editor meant “loosening.” But what about all the articles that talk about people who are “loosing weight” or “loosing faith”? In the past year, Nexis shows more than 400 loose...

Dissent Deficit

2008-08-07T14:58:42Z

To suggest that the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, were in any way blowback from U.S. actions (and inactions) in the Muslim world is to dissent, rather sharply, from the principal narrative that took root in this country, and that persists to this day, about those attacks. In the months and years following 9/11, doing so was even...

The Hunger

2008-08-05T16:38:03Z

Sandmonkey was determined to quit his blog. Sniping away at life and politics in Egypt had become too risky, he said, even under the cover of his anonymous online moniker. Too much of a chance the government thugs would hurt him or someone close to him, or smash his computer equipment. He wasn’t alone in his worry. The dozen...

Richter Mortis

2008-08-04T19:56:08Z

The recent earthquake in Southern California unearthed a reason to celebrate. Not because it wasn't the Big One, or even the Pretty Big One, but because so few media outlets measured it on the Richter scale. Charles F. Richter, a seismologist and physicist at Cal Tech, developed his eponymous scale in the 1930s along with Beno Gutenberg, who usually gets...

Talking Shop: Brendan McCarthy

2008-08-04T15:42:35Z

Brendan McCarthy spent a year and a half covering crime in New Orleans, when a police ride-along sparked an idea for a narrative piece about a murder in the Big Easy. The last part of the acclaimed series was published this Sunday. How did this story come about? I cover crime and we have a strained...