Rahm confounds Chicago media

By Media

Is he a hyper-efficient reformer using corporate management techniques to shape up a city grown lazy and weak from decades of old-fashioned patronage politics? Or is Chicago’s Mayor Rahm Emanuel a calculating maestro of Beltway spin and the dark art of “controlling the narrative” … if not the reality?

News media here in the Midwest’s largest city agonize daily over those two questions. Nobody wants to be too cynical, or, worse in the journalism profession, even a bit naïve. But after a half-year of covering this wiry whirlwind of a mayor, the answer for some is turning out to be “yes” on both counts.

Left Turn: How Media Bias Distorts the American Mind

By Media

America’s true political center can be found by examining the state of Kansas, Salt Lake County, Utah, and NASCAR fans.

Many liberals may have just blanched at that thought, but this is the argument Tim Groseclose makes in “Left Turn: How Media Bias Distorts the American Mind.” Groseclose argues that a liberal media bias distorts the average American’s political viewpoint and tilts the political field to the left. He also claims conservative news organizations such as Fox News actually present a centrist point of view.

Will the Last Reporter Please Turn out the Lights: The Collapse of Journalism and What Can Be Done to Fix it

By Media

The newspaper industry is bottoming out; print media is in dire need of a eulogy. This has been the message thrust upon the public. And with an increasing number of people looking for the quickest way to get their news (not always waiting for their morning paper — and why? Because they don’t have to), it is not completely unfounded.

“Will the Last Reporter Please Turn out the Lights: The Collapse of Journalism and What Can Be Done to Fix it,” addresses this debate through a collection of 32 thoroughly edited essays written by journalism professors and media professionals. The collection is organized in three sections, structuring the book to flow from what is known about the media crisis, to a discussion of the crises framed around American tradition and finally to essays proposing various solutions.

Harmony v. Freedom

By Media

I’ve either taught journalism or been a journalist for most of the past 40 years. Thus, on hundreds — perhaps thousands — of occasions I’ve chatted with and addressed individuals and groups of students, educators and journalists on how different news organizations, journalists and nations cover stories. Never before now, though, had I stood before a group of journalism reporting students to discuss the media’s coverage of a story about which no one was remotely familiar.

The story in question was that of the Georgetown University’s men’s basketball team which played the Chinese People’s Liberation Arm Team Aug. 18, when U.S. Vice President Joe Biden was in Beijing. During the game, a fight broke out and fists, chairs and water bottles were thrown, and Chinese audience members came on the floor and attacked and stomped Georgetown student athletes. Referees apparently did nothing to stop the brawl and the Hoya team walked off the court with the score tied 64-64.

Former Supreme Court reporter talks about the court

By Media

New York, N.Y. – Anthony Lewis is a friend of the First Amendment. But the former New York Times Supreme Court reporter said last week that the court had gone too far in recognizing the free speech of hateful funeral protesters and corporations that spend big money on politics.

Lewis said the current Supreme Court is “reluctant to draw any lines” on the First Amendment. The court’s approach seems to be so simplistic as to say “it’s speech so it’s free.”

Lewis, who wrote books popularizing First Amendment history, made the comment Wednesday evening at a Media Law Resource Center dinner where he was receiving the Brennan Defense of Freedom Award, named after the late Justice William J. Brennan Jr. award.