Woodward dismisses CNN’s lawsuit against the White House; Fox sides with CNN

Bob Woodward, half of the Washington Post team whose coverage of the Watergate scandal brought down the Nixon presidency, told an audience at the Global Financial Leadership Conference in Florida that media figures are letting their emotions affect their reporting. NBC journalist Dylan Byers quoted Woodward as saying, “In the news media there has been an emotional reaction to Trump … too many people for Trump or against Trump have…

Journalist Nellie Bly Began her Around the World in 72 Days Tour Nov 14, 1989

From Wikipedia: In 1888 Bly suggested to her editor at the New York World that she take a trip around the world, attempting to turn the fictional Around the World in Eighty Days into fact for the first time. A year later, at 9:40 a.m. on November 14, 1889, and with two days’ notice,[19] she boarded the Augusta Victoria, a steamer of the Hamburg America Line,[20] and began her 40,070 kilometer journey. She took with her the dress she…

Today’s Computer Displays Distort Pixel Art Designed for 1980s CRTs

As a kid, I remember studying my CRT displays with a microscope. Each pixel that I could control with BASIC on my TRS-80 or Atari 800 or Commodore-64 was made up of tiny arrays of red, blue, and green dots that I could not control directly. There was one display mode of the Atari 800 that officially offered 4 colors — black, red, blue, and white. My brother and I…

CNN sues President Trump and top White House aides for barring Jim Acosta

CNN has filed a lawsuit against President Trump and several of his aides, seeking the immediate restoration of chief White House correspondent Jim Acosta’s access to the White House. The lawsuit is a response to the White House’s suspension of Acosta’s press pass, known as a Secret Service “hard pass,” last week. The suit alleges that Acosta and CNN’s First and Fifth Amendment rights are being violated by the ban. —CNN

Don’t Want to Fall for Fake News? Don’t Be Lazy

Fake news is not a problem caused by those dishonorable people whose political values differ from yours. Misinformation researchers have proposed two competing hypotheses for why people fall for fake news on social media. The popular assumption—supported by research on apathy over climate change and the denial of its existence—is that people are blinded by partisanship, and will leverage their critical-thinking skills to ram the square pegs of misinformation into the…

My Student Calls Out a Mental Health Stigma in a Biased Headline — But Here’s Why We Shouldn’t Blame “The Media”

This morning a journalism student told me a friend in a different class was complaining that “the media” was stigmatizing mental illness in its coverage of yesterday’s mass shooting in California. My student told me she remembered I had mentioned that reporters often don’t write the headlines under which their stories are published, but she wondered what else she might have said. I pointed out that defending vague complaints about…