...ance, the lot of us anxiously preparing questions for his arrival. Woodward graciously received the litany of inquiries thrown at him, but posed a question of his own as the night wore on: “So, tell me – where do you get your news?” We went around in a circle, all of us offering different sources, everyone desperate to rattle off a publication more obscure or dignified than the last. In the end, the list included all of the usual suspects: the Ne...
...to learn how to use the media. The most clear-cut illustration of this personalization is the increased focus on the presidency that television heralded. “Before 1963 and the advent of thirty-minute, picture-driven television news, Congress and the presidency got about equal coverage,” said Thomas Patterson, Bradlee Professor of Government at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. “As television whetted the appetite for news about presidents, ne...
...stimates of total damage did not immediately surface in the media. Whereas, in the case of Haiti, the numbers became readily accepted aid goals, the Pakistani floods did not receive such tangible benchmarks until later in the news cycle. Rather, the array of numbers presented-subdivided by types of aid and by duration, and different in almost every news source-were far from unanimous or clear goals. The shifts and ranges in numbers do belie one f...
...p.m. on that same day, the story appeared on the Wall Street Journal’s Twitter feed. The next day, the story made the jump from digital to print and headlined the front page of The State of Columbia, South Carolina’s largest newspaper. Smith’s story, as it turns out, was entirely false. There were no facts, no sources, and no call for quotes. Several hours after publication, after conducting interviews with both Governor Haley and the Department...
...transforming political analysis into emotional entertainment. He has been dogged by accusations of misinforming, spreading propaganda and outright mythmaking in his commentary—and he also helms the most popular show in cable news. Rhetorically speaking, the pundit is a strange animal: a kind of crippled orphan using the language of a priest, a self-righteous uncle and a used car salesman combined. Someone who limps toward emotional statements, n...
...py of The New Yorker looks posh aside a vintage floral-print skirt and tortoise shell Ray-Bans on the taste-conscious student. As these time-tested symbols of status fill the recycling bin, how are we to tell who’s who by the news? Luckily, much can be gleaned from the laptop screens of our fellow information consumers. If one’s browser is pointed to the online pages of The New York Times, we can be sure that she is well-aligned with the liberal...
Media outlets have long tended to oversimplify the news and serve the public an easily digestible mix of shocking sound bites. Even storied traditional news organizations have fallen victim to sensationalism, caught by incentives to distort and dramatize, though such a “business model” may seem in outright conflict with their stated purpose to provide truthful and objective reporting. “Facts” created by such media practices, and even by NGO act...
...e roundabout guessing game of who will win does not really matter amid the candidate-media interplay. In this seemingly symbiotic relationship between journalism and politics, how do the two really interact? The nature of the news, and the media that dictates it, is cyclical. Following Walter Lippmann’s “searchlight analogy” – where a topic oscillates between periods of quiescence and alarm – and owing to limited room on the news cycle, the atten...
We’re bringing sexy back. That is the point of this issue. But backing up a bit from that (slightly racy) conclusion. When we accepted pitches for this issue, we were presented with one that inadvertently posed a question about the way the news works: Should reader demand and consumption drive the content of news? Being members, to varying degrees and qualifications, of the media which the pitch questioned, and being rather self-indulgent as is...
...s pay only lip service to tax reform. Worst of all, the biggest drivers of the debt—entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare, which account for roughly half of government expenditure—remain untouchable. The good news is that the American people, and even their esteemed leaders, seem to recognize that we have a problem. Virtually everyone who isn’t on the board of a defense contractor agrees that excess can and must be cut from the d...
Follow us at
Like us on
Recent Comments