This week the U.S. will preview five stamps featuring 20th Century journalists. A press notice of an Oct. 5 press conference names them: war correspondent Martha Gellhorn (1908-1998); John Hersey (1914-1993), whose most famous work, was Hiroshima; CBS correspondent George Polk (1913-1948), killed while reporting on corruption involving U.S. aid in Greece after WW II;…
The official name is ‘Union of Myanmar’, but media outlets appear split on what to call the Southeast Asian nation once known as Burma. The BBC and the Bangkok Post steadfastly stick to Burma, while the Globe and Mail uses Myanmar, stating the name better reflects pre-colonial terminology. There’s power in the act of naming,…
Buried in the despair of a U.S. media-industry roundup — to which it devotes an extraordinarily long and justifiably depressing introduction — the Columbia Journalism Review presents some interesting ideas about non-profit journalism. Excerpts: “Never has there been a greater need for independent, original, credible information about our complex society and the world at large.…
American journalist Seymour Hersh has much to say In a Q&A interview about the Internet’s impact on journalism: “There is an enormous change taking place in this country in journalism. And it is online. We are eventually — and I hate to tell this to the New York Times or the Washington Post — we…
“Paying an Author and Putting Her Down” is a report in the New York Times about Naomi Klein’s odd appearance in the National Post. The Post paid for the rights to run excerpts of Klein’s recent book and thus aided her success. Then, it ran those excerpts beside commentary trashing Klein (example: at worst, “her…
His editor figured him for a “rabble-rouser and liberal,” but Larry Lubenow knew a good story when he heard one. And so he quoted Louis Armstrong when the jazz legend finally spoke out on race relations — and helped change the course of U.S. race politics. David Margolick tells the tale in the New York…
Maclean’s, true to form lately, is at the centre of controversy again. This time it’s in the U.S., because of a magazine cover depicting U.S. President George W. Bush dressed as Saddam Hussein, including a moustache, beret and military attire. Here’s the canoe.ca site (CP) story. USA Today took up the issue on a blog.…
One good thing about the charges Dan Rather is making that government and corporations unduly influence the U.S. media is that they’ll be put to the test, in his law suit against CBS for wrongful dismissal. That’s critical because, as with many conspiracy theories, Rather’s allegations are compelling. And — as with all conspiracy theories…
Some excerpts of recent stories about this week’s CRTC hearings: Federal broadcast regulators revealed anxieties over delving into journalistic standards and independence as they heard complaints from unions on Wednesday about the negative consequences of cross-media ownership. Canadian Press story on CBC.ca — Canada’s broadcasters should be required to compete for their licences when they…
I often wonder how many of today’ media “products” — yes, those things that we used to think of as “journalism” outlets — have gone from aspiring to straight reporting to routinely reporting everything from a premise that our society ought to be run on principles of Economism, a libertarian and free-market perspective that everything…