Newsworthiness

As Father Time faded into history with the end of 2005, he was spinning out of control. Over the past twelve months, the ideal of accurate, accountable, civic-minded news media faced nearly constant attack. Fake news abounded, from Pentagon-planted stories in Iraqi newspapers to corporate- and government-funded video news releases aired by U.S. newsrooms. Enough payola pundits surfaced to...

"The Way to Read Newspapers to Train the Brain," by Professor Ryuta Kawashima at Tohoku University, says "a newspaper is the best tool to train the brain." Professor Kawashima is one of the top authorities in the research of the brain and its functions, and has released over 10 books alone in this field. In this book, Kawashima says that the most important part of the brain is the prefrontal...

IT WAS the journalistic equivalent of a drive-by shooting. The targets of Washington Post reporters Jonathan Finer and Doug Struck were two of journalism's favorites: Web loggers and the U.S. military. "Bloggers, Money, Now Weapons in Information War," read the headline over their story, which appeared Monday. "U.S. Recruits Advocates to the Front, Pays Iraqi TV Stations for Coverage," the subhead...

This year's series of controversies about high-profile reporters and their government sources led me to think about the condition of journalism instruction that I have observed while teaching potential future journalists at a half-dozen colleges and universities. I began teaching as a part-time adjunct because my perception during occasional guest lectures had been that my areas of expertise --...

LOS ANGELES (AP) – They lurk in bushes, camp out in cars and hover in helicopters. Some are brazen enough to openly brandish their cameras, like old Western gunslingers. They may be hated, but their work – candid pictures of celebs in unguarded moments – is coveted. They are the paparazzi, purveyors of pix that are the lifeblood of the weekly star-tracking mags and tabs. Their photos demand huge...

Oh what a year for plagiarists. Herewith, a quick collection of the year’s instances of plagiarism in the media. We’ve tried to catch them all, but can’t promise that this is a definitive list. Please email us if you know of one we’ve missed. (Then we’ll take your information and use it as our own without attribution.) In January Siddharth Srivastava, an India-based freelancer for the...

Since this column was born again almost a year ago as a vantage point from which to observe the intersection of politics, culture and language, I resolve to continue stumbling along in Orwell's huge shoes with an aim toward simplifying English, so we ''are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy.'' I resolve to ''bring about some improvement'' with ''the present political chaosconnected (to) the...

As one would expect in a year when one of the underreported stories was our government's covert propaganda campaigns, there's plenty to unravel: stories that should never have been stories, stories whose reporting largely missed the point, and stories barely told at all in mainstream US media. The good news is that, more than ever, mainstream media is no longer the last word in journalism. Foreign...

President Bush has been summoning newspaper editors lately in an effort to prevent publication of stories he considers damaging to national security. The efforts have failed, but the rare White House sessions with the executive editors of The Washington Post and New York Times are an indication of how seriously the president takes the recent reporting that has raised questions about the...

Each day and every week, a great mass of print journalism is produced in this country -- something all too easy to forget when reading a mere sliver of that output in your local paper or scanning the links on your favorite blog. From that mass, the work of the country's Big Five dailies is usually more than enough to keep us occupied in our pursuit of lively, helpful and quick media criticism. At...