There’s an interesting story coming out of the Wisconsin recall election. The latest polls show Wisconsin governor, Scott Walker, in a virtual dead heat with Tom Barrett, his most likely opponent. This comes despite a huge advantage in advertising spending by Walker.
For a time late last month, Rush Limbaugh succeeded in abusing copyright law to get YouTube to take down a Daily Kos video stringing together the insulting remarks he made about Sandra Fluke, the Georgetown law student who became a featured player in the contraception controversy a few months back.
The video stitched together short excerpts of Limbaugh calling Fluke a slut and a prostitute who should videotape herself having sex. Limbaugh apologized (sort of) after he began to lose advertisers. But when Daily Kos helpfully put together a greatest hits of Limbaugh’s comments, Limbaugh used copyright law to demand that YouTube take down the video.
John Jackson, a veteran political scientist at the Paul Simon Public Policy Institute at Southern Illinois University, recently told a room of newspaper editors that the media are partly to blame for the misperception held by most residents of Southern Illinois that they don’t get their fair share from the government.
Almost eight of ten residents of the 18 southern counties in Illinois told Simon pollsters that they got less than their fair share in state spending. Jackson says that clearly false belief results partly from shallow media coverage.
As the Christian Science Monitor enters its fourth year as a “Web-first” operation, it seems an appropriate time to see where the news product now stands.
After about 100 years of publication, the Monitor indeed has changed. Once considered by most media experts to be an elite print daily newspaper, it’s a bit unclear whether it still is a newspaper, or rather a weekly print magazine with daily online trappings. And can such a bifurcated product, with a niche all its own, still be considered “elite,” when it has no real products with which it might be compared?
Last week the Missouri House passed a bill that the sponsor calls the Whistleblower Protection Act. The law actually removes protections from whistleblowers rather than enacting them. This is the latest version of a bill commonly called the Enterprise Rent-A-Car bill because the Clayton, Mo. firm has been lobbying to weaken whistleblower protections for the past six years. Earlier versions of the bill have passed but been vetoed by Gov. Jay Nixon.
Enterprise has made weakening whistleblower protections a top legislative priority ever since the firm lost a whistleblower lawsuit filed by its fired corporate comptroller, Thomas P. Dunn. Dunn testified that he was fired after taking the position that Enterprise was not following the accounting principles required of a public company. At the time of the dispute, around the time of the Enron debacle, Enterprise was planning to go public, although it later decided against that course. To go public, it needed Dunn to attest to the company’s adherence to generally accepted accounting principles.
Should a student newspaper run the name of a female rape victim if she spoke in a public forum on the topic and gave those at the forum her name?
This is an appropriate question to ask in a journalism ethics class when discussing what should and should not be covered and how to go about covering it. But the question becomes more intriguing when following the reaction to the story that was run in a college newspaper.
The USA Today ran a piece about the plight of many college newspapers and their uncertain future. Gateway Journalism Review’s next issue devotes a portion of its magazine to this issue. What problems do college newspapers face and what are they doing to alleviate those problems.
This issue affects more than just college campuses. College newspapers are breeding grounds for tomorrow’s journalists. Tomorrow’s professionals are today’s students. Perhaps the answers to today’s problems in the professional newsroom will be answered by the innovations needed in college newsrooms. Or maybe college newspapers will continue to try the methods professional newsrooms are using. Maybe students can make them work.
