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In this new era of media transparency, many expected a fuller explanation from The New York Times about why it held its NSA spying scoop for more than a year. What we do know, however, is that editors routinely accede to government demands that they withhold certain information. Scott Armstrong helps facilitate dialogues between intelligence agencies and the media, and talks to Bob about the process.
While excoriating the Times for disclosing the NSA’s surveillance program, President Bush trotted out an old chestnut about the danger of leaks. He cited a 1998 newspaper story that disclosed Osama Bin Laden’s use of a satellite phone, and claimed –as many have before – that the disclosure led Bin Laden to stop using his phone. Brooke wonders if we can really blame the media for the failure to capture Bin Laden.
The money trail of indicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff last week led reporters to a couple of prominent Washington opinion makers. It turns out that for years, Abramoff has been paying two think-tankers, Doug Bandow and Peter Ferrara, to write op-ed pieces favorable to Abramoff’s clients. Bob talks to blogger Joshua Marshall about opinions for sale.
Since 1928, the New York-based newspaper Irish Echo has chronicled the lives of Irish immigrants and their descendants. But as the economy of the “Celtic Tiger” booms, some Irish-Americans are returning to the motherland. And so for the first time in its history, the Irish Echo is now being printed and distributed in the Emerald Isle. Brooke talks to the editor Sean MacCarthaigh about his paper’s homecoming.
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.
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.
With winter taking hold in the Himalayas, the human tragedy triggered by the October 8th earthquake is still very much a current emergency. But you wouldn't know it from looking at the American news-scape. In recent weeks, coverage of the quake's aftermath has been spotty in print and all but absent from TV. Bob speaks to CBS "nonbudsman" Vaughn Ververs and Washington Post foreign editor Keith Richburg about the story's downward arc.
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.
