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Tue, 26 Aug 2008
Brief Encounters
Short reviews of books about the run-up to World War II and the media's coverage of John McCain
By Posted at 09:00 AM
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... Read More
Thu, 14 Aug 2008
Interpret the World
Vincent Sheean's Personal History reminds us what foreign coverage once was…and what it might be again
By Posted at 01:37 PM
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... Read More
Thu, 31 Jul 2008
My Facts, Your Facts
America and the pursuit of willful delusion
By Posted at 09:00 AM Comments (14)
Reader comments posted on digital news sites are often heavy on invective, hurled from noms d’Internet that allow people to disregard traditional norms of civil discourse. For many of these anonymous snipers, the reported facts are not facts at all, but the unreliable product of paid liars, incompetents, toadies, and haters who dare to call themselves journalists.
How did... Read More
Thu, 17 Jul 2008
Pyrrhic Victory
Winning and losing at Guantánamo
By Posted at 09:00 AM
Just a few months ago, in April of this year, the Guantánamo Bay detainee Salim Hamdan appeared before the Navy captain acting as his military judge, and announced that he would boycott the war-crimes trial the Bush administration had planned for him. “There is no such thing as justice here,” Hamdan said of the special tribunal constituted to try... Read More
Thu, 19 Jun 2008
Brief Encounters
Short reviews of books about the Pulitzers, early African American journalism, and the relationship between advertisers and consumers
By Posted at 09:00 AM
Pulitzer’s Gold: Behind the Prize for Public Service Journalism By Roy J. Harris Jr.
University of Missouri Press
473 pages, $39.95
It is possible that hardly anybody would remember Joseph Pulitzer—he died in 1911—had he not attached his name to the Pulitzer Prizes. Pulitzer, publisher of the New York World and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, established prizes in journalism,... Read More
Tue, 17 Jun 2008
America's Think Tank
Politics warps a new history of the mysterious RAND Corporation
By Posted at 09:00 AM
Ridiculed in Dr. Strangelove (as the “Bland Corporation”), castigated by Pravda (as the American “academy of science and death”), and thrust into the spotlight when the Pentagon Papers were stolen from it, the RAND Corporation has played a somewhat mysterious role in U.S. public policy since its founding in 1946. In Soldiers of Reason: The RAND Corporation and the... Read More
Tue, 10 Jun 2008
What We Sow
The maddening folly of our man-made pension crisis
By Posted at 09:00 AM
Over the past couple of decades, American companies and American state and city governments have descended into financial purgatory just the way, in The Sun Also Rises, Mike Campbell says he went bankrupt: “gradually, and then suddenly.” A deadly combination of generous pension and health-care packages and years of passing the buck has left institutions like General Motors, Ford,... Read More
Thu, 15 May 2008
Best Face Forward
At the Newseum, a troubled industry looks good under glass
By Posted at 09:00 AM
And we think today’s reporters have it tough.
Picture this: To land a job, the journalistic aspirant known to history as Nellie Bly agrees to feign mental illness in order to uncover abuses at the notorious asylum for women on Blackwell’s Island. In a new “4-D” version of this familiar tale at the Newseum, an editor warns the... Read More
Tue, 6 May 2008
Love Thy Neighbor
The religion beat in an age of intolerance
By Posted at 09:00 AM Comments (9)
To watch Townsend discussing the religion beat, click here.
In the Gospel of Matthew, it doesn’t take long for the author to show his readers two different sides of Jesus Christ. One minute Jesus is sitting on a mountain, delivering a powerful sermon to a presumably rapt audience: “Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit...
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Video: Love Thy Neighbor
The religion beat in an age of intolerance
By Posted at 09:00 AM
Tim Townsend discusses the story he wrote for the May/June issue of Columbia Journalism Review. To read that article, “Love Thy Neighbor,” click here.
