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May 02, 2006
Recommended reading
John Carroll, former editor of the Los Angeles Times, spoke last week to the American Society of Newspaper Editors in Seattle. Carroll is now with the Shorenstein Center at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.
As Carroll says in the speech, he’s been pondering the state of American journalism. The speech contains some inside baseball aimed at Carroll’s fellow editors, but he also discusses issues that we editors worry deeply about. They are issues that good citizens should also worry deeply about, including the erosion of daily journalism as a vital check on government.
Here’s a link to Carroll’s piece.
In a somewhat related exchange, here are two more links: one to a Wall Street Journal editorial critical of what the Journal sees as "the unseemly symbiosis between elements of the press corps and a cabal of partisan bureaucrats at the CIA and elsewhere in the 'intelligence community' who have been trying to undermine the Bush Presidency"; and the other to New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller’s response to the Journal editorial.
Posted by Mike Pride at May 2, 2006 05:55 PM
Comments
I used to watch CNN World Report and subscribe to World Press Review for the very reason you site, that the news from one source can be slanted very differently from another, depending upon for whom it was written.
Stuart Loury, Producer of the World Report noted that he had been a subscriber of FBIS (Foreign Broadcast Information Service) which was instituted by the CIA during WWII. It collected daily newspapers from many countries for intelligence analysis.
An individual with the web can use a similar approach and read news from any city or country. Some do, and some are happy to consume from a single or few sources.
For journalists, in a for profit environment, to expect to be more than one point of light in a huge array of news sources is an old paradigm. Dan Rather found that out the hard way.
Regarding the CIA, I have no doubt that they would like to tell everybody what to think, after all, that's the business their in.
Posted by: fullert at May 3, 2006 11:01 AM