Category: Media

The staff and contributors at Gateway Journalism Review strive to deliver timely, accurate and thought-provoking content to readers. We do this through this weekly eNewsletter and our quarterly print publication. For Gateway Journalism Review to continue offering the only Midwest-based critical review of media, we need your support.

Editorial endorsements of political candidates are a rich and important tradition of U.S. newspapers. Though time-consuming and controversial, endorsements are an important part of the democratic process and civic duty of newspapers. However, waning circulation and cuts in editorial staffs at many newspapers have resulted in fewer editorial endorsements.

To say the news media’s coverage of Monday’s Sandy storm was repetitious is an understatement. Associated Press photos have dominated front pages this week, and National Public Radio has all but forgotten there is anything else to cover in either the nation or overseas.

Journalists often use the metaphor of the “revolving door” in stories about a government official going to work for companies they once regulated. But in one recent example in St. Louis, it is the journalist who is walking through the door instead. Former St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter Jake Wagman traded in his press credentials in June for a chance to do opposition research for the political clientele of his new firm, Shield Political Research.

Almost a decade after the release of the documentary film “Fahrenheit 911,” a new mass-marketed documentary has hit the political scene with similar ambitions. Hailing from the other side of the aisle, with the intellectual bravado of Michael Moore and the same fact-finding approach to production, academic Dinesh D’Souza has released “2016: Obama’s America” four months before the 2012 presidential election.