Tag: journalism

Prosecutor urges independent audit of Post-Dispatch series

Media
by William H. Freivogel

BY WILLIAM H. FREIVOGEL / St. Louis Circuit Attorney Jennifer Joyce has called upon St. Louis Post-Dispatch editor Gilbert Bailon to order an “independent audit of the reporting” for the paper’s high-profile “Jailed by Mistake” investigation. She wrote in a Nov. 26 letter to Bailon that her staff had found “substantial factual errors” in the paper’s conclusion that more than 100 people had been mistakenly jailed for more than 2,000 total days.

Well-worn phrases set journalists’ teeth on edge

Media
by William A. Babcock

BY WILLIAM A. BABCOCK / Family traditions die hard. When I was in college in the Dark Ages, my mother would send me a few business-size envelopes each week – often with a letter, and always stuffed with newspaper and magazine clippings. There were Cleveland Plain Dealer clippings about the Indians baseball and Browns football teams, clippings from the Elyria Chronicle-Telegram about news from northern Ohio, Avon Lake Press community updates on which high school girlfriends were getting married and to whom, Newsweek clippings about politics and world events – the works.

Can Greenwald be trusted with journalism’s future?

Media
by William H. Freivogel

BY WILLIAM H. FREIVOGEL / Every journalist should read this week’s debate between Bill Keller, the former executive editor of The New York Times, and Glenn Greenwald, who has written stories in The Guardian based on Edward Snowden’s leaks about NSA surveillance. The debate is between Keller’s classical brand of impartial, let-the-reader decide journalism and Greenwald’s brand of advocacy journalism where the reporter transparently discloses his beliefs and asserts facts that support those beliefs.

GJR book review: ‘Cronkite’s War’ — and that’s the way it is

Media
by Paul Van Slambrouck

BY PAUL VAN SLAMBROUCK / That famed broadcaster Walter Cronkite was regarded as “the most trusted man in America” probably says as much about the America of his time as it does about Cronkite. Cronkite is etched deep in American public consciousness. He was at the vanguard of television journalists who sat down for dinner each evening with the American family. He wore the face of a nation’s pain as he fiddled with his dark-framed glasses and fought back tears while announcing the death of President John F. Kennedy in 1963. On the flip side, there was common wisdom and reassurance with his nightly signature signoff: “And that’s the way it is.”