I don’t click on headlines that use words like “might be” or “possibly.” Journalists are not in the business of reporting what might happen. Neither do they repeat rumors. A thing is not necessarily true just because a source — such as the neighborhood busybody, a crook caught red-handed, a prankster, or the President of the…
Journalism matters. Educated citizens who understand and appreciate the role of the free press in a democracy are a threat to authoritarian figures who benefit by sowing mistrust. It’s perfectly reasonable to point out errors and bias in specific news stories. (News organizations love reporting about when their competitors get a story wrong, and journalists…
Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Nick Anderson reflects on the recent firing of former Pittsburgh Post-Gazette staff cartoonist Rob Rogers. Getting a string of cartoons killed is generally not a good harbinger of things to come, and going public with it is a risky gambit. But, there is absolutely no reason to be an editorial cartoonist if…
The more you identify with a particular point of view, the harder it is to recognize the difference between facts and opinions, and the easier it becomes to accept as “fact” an opinion that aligns with and affirms your world view. This is not something that only the “Liberal Elite Media” or the “Deplorable Right”…
The original was a stunning image, which has been used to criticize ICE’s policy of separating children from parents attempting to immigrate at the border — a policy which Trump says he dislikes. The animated version of the Time cover makes it clear that this is a composite picture, though of course the emotional power…
No fake news here. This is why journalism matters. It wasn’t the moral consequences of his own immigration crackdown that caused Trump to act — it was “the sight of” those consequences. What happens to those families after they have been detained for over 20 days remains to be seen. Very glad to hear that…
After 25 years as the editorial cartoonist for The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, I was fired on Thursday. I blame Donald Trump. Well, sort of. I should’ve seen it coming. When I had lunch with my new boss a few months ago, he informed me that the paper’s publisher believed that the editorial cartoonist was akin to…
I tell this old newsroom tale to my students: An angry editor sees a cub reporter coming into work. “I sent you to cover a concert,” says the editor. “Why didn’t you file the story?” The cub reporter says, “The concert hall burned down.” Sometimes the story you set out to cover is not the…
Context matters. Good journalists should go out of their way to avoid creating a mistaken impression. Fox News apologized Tuesday after receiving a torrent of criticism over the network’s use of photos of various players for the Philadelphia Eagles kneeling in prayer, creating the misleading impression that they were demonstrating during the national anthem. The…
Facebook is discontinuing the “trending” list. After the employees hired by Facebook to curate the trending news items were found to bury news they didn’t like, Facebook fired them all and tried to automate the process. If it matters to you whether their bias was liberal or conservative you can look it up, but my…
This is really noteworthy. Today the President of the United States denied a statement that was issued in the White House by one of his own officials, claiming that the official does not exist and that the New York Times invented the source. This is not about a reporter making an error, or selectively quoting…
In the Washington Post, Greg Sargent analyzes a pattern in Trump’s very effective rhetoric. As you’ll recall, after Trump made his “animals” comment, his defenders — and Trump himself — erupted in anger at news organizations that had not explained that it had come amid a discussion of MS-13 members. It’s not clear from the…
NRATV host Collins Idehen Jr (who goes by the name Colion Noir) made what appeared to be a serious call for legislation to restrict the First Amendment — then said he wanted people who were horrified by that call to know “That’s the same feeling gun owners get when they hear people say the same…
Lesley Stahl, a correspondent on “60 Minutes,” made the disclosure on Monday during a live interview with Judy Woodruff of PBS NewsHour, drawing a stunned silence from the audience. After Trump began to unload on the news media, she said, she asked him whether he planned to stop attacking the press — a hallmark of…
I love STEM. My SAT score for math was exactly the same as verbal. When I was in grad school, struggling with Sausserian semiotics and Beowulf in the original Old English, I taught myself C++, Turbo Pascal, and Java for fun. For some project I was coding I learned how to do 3D matrix transformations…
Confirm what your sources tell you. Fact-checking makes the difference between ethical journalism (which sometimes upsets the powerful) and propaganda (which always aids oppressors).
Here’s some excellent analysis of Trump’s latest attack on journalism (I blogged a bit about this in “More Evidence That, to Trump, ‘Fake News’ Means Critical News“). Trump either doesn’t understand or ignores the difference between a story he doesn’t like and one that is not true. He conflates the two for his own political…
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