Media, Austerity and Bad Medicine
The election results in Greece and France sent a clearer message about austerity: Voters don’t like it. That sentiment isn’t hard to fathom; massive spending cuts and pay cuts aren’t fixing the...
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You Think You’re Getting Social Security But You’re Not, Says...
What should the U.S. do about the so-called “fiscal cliff”? Who better to ask than Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, “one of the world’s most influential bankers”? Lloyd Blankfein (photo: Stuart...
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What’s Missing from CBS’s Gaza History?
Giving viewers a quick sense of context and history is important in any story, but especially in the Israel/Palestine conflict. Doing a bad job of it is perhaps worse than not doing it at all. Gaza...
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This Time, Trust Anonymous WMD Claims–They’ve Got ‘Specific Intelligence’
The message could hardly be clearer: According to U.S. intelligence, Syrian government could very well be preparing to use chemical weapons to put down the long and bloody rebellion against ruler...
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Hugo Chavez: Why Does He Hate Us?
If there’s one thing media want you to know about Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez, it’s that he doesn’t like the United States. On the PBS NewsHour (1/10/13), Ray Suarez told viewers that Chavez...
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Iranians and Their Clunky Propaganda!
Last night on the CBS Evening News (2/25/13), viewers saw this brief report from anchor Scott Pelley: Iran’s culture minister today called the Oscar-winning film Argo about the Iranian hostage crisis...
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Syria and the ‘Red Line’ Nonsense
cc photo: Michael Lusk Late last week came news that the some U.S. intelligence believes, with low to moderate confidence, that chemical weapons–possibly sarin–was used in Syria. There were, as Jim...
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The Problem With Journalism? Scott Pelley Blames the Internet
When big-time reporters decide to try their hands at media criticism, the results are usually disappointing–but they can also be quite revealing. So when a video of CBS Evening News anchor Scott...
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Bradley Manning on TV Network News
The first day of Bradley Manning’s court-martial trial was, by any rational definition, big news. Manning allegedly shared thousands of documents with the anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks. Those...
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What Do You Call Edward Snowden?
On CBS Evening News (8/13/13), anchor Scott Pelley gave viewers a brief–and very misleading–update on Edward Snowden: In an interview today, Edward Snowden appears to describe himself as a spy....
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CBS Wonders What Happened to Global Warming
(cc photo: Daniel Reichert) There’s an old joke, maybe best known from Woody Allen film Annie Hall: “Two elderly women are at a Catskill mountain resort, and one of them says, ‘Boy, the food at this...
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NSA Stenography at CBS
The latest revelations about NSA surveillance were pretty shocking. Under the headline “NSA Infiltrates Links to Yahoo, Google Data Centers Worldwide, Snowden Documents Say,” Barton Gellman of the...
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An American Reporter in Paris
US media have always seemed to have an appetite for reporting certain news from France, so recent revelations that President Francois Hollande has been romantically linked with an actress was bound to...
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The CIA Aided Polio’s Comeback–but Media Have Forgotten the Story
Polio had been battled to near-extinction after decades of effort, but this year the WHO confirmed 68 new cases and declared it an international public health emergency. Nearly 80 percent of those...
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Weather From Another Planet: Wildfires and Climate Change
You may have heard that major wildfires broke out in Southern California. The state is in a deep drought, its fire season is starting earlier than normal and the fires that have burned so far have...
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American TV to Chinese Spies: Do as US Says, Not as US Does
Early this week, the FBI announced that five Chinese hackers had been indicted for spying on American companies. That’s right, economic espionage. To anyone who a passing familiarity with the Edward...
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Iraq Is a Place Where Americans Suffered
The invasion of the major Iraqi city of Mosul by the Sunni militant group ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria) has US reporters recalling the Iraq War–and showing once again how they see that deadly...
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Meet the CEO Bold Enough to Kill Thousands of Jobs
Have you heard the one about the billionaire CEO laying off thousands of workers? On the June 26 broadcast of the CBS Evening News, anchor Scott Pelley announced that while “companies aren’t cutting...
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Another 60 Minutes Puff Piece
Based on its legacy, the CBS show 60 Minutes is still sometimes thought of as the remaining place in TV news where tough investigative journalism has a home. But lately, they’ve been doing something...
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Never Too Late to Tell Old Iraq Lies
CBS Face the Nation featured interviews with Barack Obama and George W. Bush this weekend (11/9/14), and part of the latter discussion covered the Iraq War. The show provided one more chance for Bush,...
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