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Last week, Democratic Congressman John Murtha called for a resolution terminating U.S. troop involvement in Iraq. Amid an increasingly acrimonious debate on the Iraq war, his comments drew an extremely sharp reaction from congressional Republicans and the White House. Bob talks to Mark Halperin, political director of ABC News and editor of The Note, about the press coverage of this latest war of words.
Federal use of the "mosaic theory" of classifying information, whereby otherwise individual pieces of unclassified information are deemed classified because when viewed together they take on added significance, has enjoyed a resurgence since 9/11. Brooke discusses the theory with David Pozen, author of a forthcoming Yale Law Journal article about its uses and abuses.
It's been five years since the Chandler family sold the Los Angeles Times to Chicago-based media conglomerate the Tribune Company. In that time, the paper has been viewed as a test case on how to reconcile journalistic imperatives with the bottom-line pressures imposed by a parent corporation. Brooke talks to Kevin Roderick, a blogger at LAObserved.com and former Times editor, about the fallout.
A news photo is sometimes worth more than 1,000 words. The image of a napalm-burned Vietnamese child fleeing in terror, for example, resonates decades later in ways that millions of words never quite did. So what if such images were produced not by journalists but by the military itself? In recent months, newspapers large and small have been running pictures from Iraq shot by military personnel. Bob talks to Santiago Lyon, director of photography for the AP, about this trend.
Despite millions of dollars in television advertising, beer sales have gone flat in recent years. Meanwhile, market share for both spirits and wine has crept up. Bob Lachky, executive vice president for global industry development at Anheuser-Busch, is trying to organize the Beer Institute and other brewers into a media campaign to fight back. He tells Bob that beer relies too much on one message, and too much on the small screen.
One year ago, the world witnessed what appeared to be a spontaneous uprising by angry voters in the streets of Kiev. But for months, Ukrainian activists had been carefully honing their message and tactics. They did it with the help of American-backed "uprising consultants" - veterans of opposition movements in Serbia, Belarus, and Georgia. Bob speaks with one of them, Serbian student activist Ivan Moravic.
There are journalism's stars, who consume most of the ink and the air time, and there are its grunts, who do most of the legwork and barely get a byline. Mark Stamey, formerly of The New York Post, was one of the latter. He walked the "bad-luck" beat, gathering facts about murders, fires, evictions and accidents. Host Brooke Gladstone spent one Thanksgiving Day on the job with Stamey, who has come to see the whole world as a morgue.
Highlights from Past ShowsThe Washington saga that has gripped journalism watchers for many months has taken another unexpected turn. Seems that storied scribe Bob Woodward may have been the first journalist contacted by the notorious Valerie Plame leaker. And he kept mum until this week. Brooke reflects on the transformation of Watergate Bob into White House Bob.
This week, as the 'auto-body-count' in France grew ever higher by night, anxiety in the press grew by day. In the U.S., headlines read “Paris is Burning” and commentary ranged from criticism of French authorities to warnings of a “clash of civilizations” that could at any moment sweep the globe. The Week’s Susan Caskie joins guest host Daljit Dhaliwal for a review of the coverage elsewhere in the world.
On the Media is funded by The Bydale Foundation, The Ford Foundation, The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and the Overbrook Foundation.
