Category: Media

Letter to the editor: On “Progress of the Beacon/KWMU merger”

Media
by Letter to the editor

Dear editor, I urge you to make Terry Ganey’s story from last fall about the Beacon/Public Radio available online. Few people in daily journalism, current or former, have seen it. (The two Post-Dispatch staff members who are quoted in the story aren’t aware of its publication.) Plus, it’s odd not to publish online a story about an online publication. I’d also suggest that you expand on the passage about the Beacon’s, and Public Radio’s, extraordinary interest in chess.

Progress of the Beacon/KWMU merger

Media
by Terry Ganey

On one wall of the St. Louis Public Radio newsroom hangs an electronic sign resembling a large flat-screen television with colored graphs, charts and numbers telling the story of the station’s website. One recent summer afternoon, a visitor saw that 89 people were checking out the site to see what the news operation had to offer. Tim Eby, director and general manager of St. Louis Public Radio, said more people have visited the station’s website since it merged with the online startup the St. Louis Beacon six months ago. The number of listeners to KWMU, 90.7 FM, has remained about the same. While the news staff was roughly doubled to 21 and the Beacon as a brand disappeared, the combined operation remains a boutique for news consumers. Eby said the station has averaged about 120,000 unique visitors a month.

Four Pinocchios for ‘Hands Up;’ Time to own up, editor says

Media
by William H. Freivogel

By WILLIAM H. FREIVOGEL / A month after Officer Darren Wilson killed Michael Brown, CNN broadcast what looked like a blockbuster “exclusive.” It was a videotape of two white construction workers who said Brown had his hands up when killed. One worker even gestures with his hands up. CNN’s analysts called it a “game changer” and its legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin said the witnesses had described “a cold-blooded murder.” But instead of a game changer or evidence of a crime, the contractors turned out to be two of a score of unreliable witnesses and the clearest example of how the media helped create the “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” myth.

Michel Martin urges journalists to tell the uncomfortable truth

Media
by Ben Lyons

By BEN LYONS / “Journalism matters because we have the responsibility to inform readers of the truth of their world, even when they don’t want us to.” That was the message Michel Martin, host of NPR’s “Tell Me More,” and journalist of more than 25 years gave guests at Gateway Journalism Review’s First Amendment Celebration March 19. Drawing journalists and friends of news from around the region, the event took place at the Edward Jones headquarters in Des Peres, Mo. “We are following the story of ourselves as a nation,” Martin said of the media’s Ferguson coverage. Just as we as a people are imperfect, journalism should “hold a mirror to both flaws and beauty,” she said.

In Fox News We Trust — Should Walter Cronkite be rolling over in his grave?

Media
by George Salamon

By GEORGE SALAMON / The bad news for liberals and progressives arrived via a poll conducted by Quinnipiac University: Fox News was the news source among broadcast and cable networks Americans trusted most. Fox beat all networks handily, garnering 29 percent as “most trustworthy” among the 1,286 registered voters called between February 26 and March 2. CNN took second place with 22 percent, CBS and NBC tied at distant third with 10 percent each, ABC followed with 8 percent and forward-leaning MSNBC was at the back of the pack with 7 percent. The Washington Post was aghast that “for millions of Americans Fox News is the mainstream media.” Liberal blogs found the poll results “terrifying” and bemoaned the fact that the conservative network, a “Murdoch-owned scream machine” to one blogspot, had become a “ratings juggernaut.” Should Walter Cronkite, icon of liberal or mainstream broadcast news during the 1960 and ’70s, be turning over in his grave?