Shattered Glass
“At 25, Stephen Glass was the most sought-after young reporter in the nation’s capital, producing knockout articles for magazines ranging from The New Republic to Rolling Stone. Trouble was, he made things up—sources, quotes, whole stories—in a breathtaking web of deception that emerged as the most sustained fraud in modern journalism.
Changing Times
“At nine o’clock on the morning of September 6th, Jill Abramson was riding the subway uptown from her Tribeca loft. It was her first day as executive editor of the New York Times, and also the first time in the paper’s hundred and sixty years that a woman’s name would appear at the top of the masthead. Abramson described herself as “excited,” because of the history she was about to make, and “a little nervous,” because she knew that many in the newsroom feared her.
Morgan Spurlock: I'm With the Brand
“Brands and content creators have struggled over control and influence for more than a century. As Spurlock writes in the production notes handed out at screenings of his film, “In the 1800s, Jules Verne sold the naming rights to shipping companies in Around the World in 80 Days, and in the early days of film, Thomas Edison put ads for his own products in the movies.” Radio pioneers like Fred Allen (who quipped, back in the early 1950s, that TV “allows people who haven’t anything to do to watch people who haven’t done anything” — hello, Paris Hilton and her fans!) battled and assuaged their sponsors in the same uneasy way that network news shows do now. Richard Sandomir of The New York Times recently reported that some announcers at ESPN were paid by Nike and Reebok to wear their shoes. Writing on the media-industry blog Romenesko, investigative journalist David Cay Johnston was dismayed: “If [Robert] Iger [CEO of Disney, which owns ESPN] does nothing,” he will leave “doubt as to who may be on the take, whose agenda is being advanced by greasing palms, and which critical stories are fueled by under-the-table payments.” Given this kind of hand-wringing, it’s fair to ask, as Spurlock’s movie does: Just what kind of purity are we looking for? How clean does content need to be — or can it be?
Women's Funding Network Sex Trafficking Study Is Junk Science
““This is a logical fallacy,” says Steve Doig, the Knight Chair in Journalism at Arizona State University, who reviewed the study at our request. “Consider this analogy: Imagine that 100 people were shown pictures of various automobiles and asked to identify the make, and that 38 percent of the time people misidentified Fords as Chevrolets. Using the Schapiro logic, this would mean that 38 percent of Fords on the street actually are Chevys.”
But the Georgia sponsors were happy with the results—after all, the scary-sounding study agreed with what they were saying all along. So the Women’s Funding Network paid Schapiro to dramatically expand the study to include Michigan, Minnesota, New York, and Texas. (Georgia’s Kayrita Anderson sits on the board of the Women’s Funding Network)
North Korea’s Digital Underground
“The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea is the very archetype of a “closed society.” It ranks dead last—196th out of 196 countries—in Freedom House’s Freedom of the Press index. Unlike the citizens of, say, Tunisia or Egypt, to name two countries whose populations recently tapped the power of social media to help upend the existing political order, few North Koreans have access to Twitter, Facebook, or YouTube. In fact, except for a tiny elite, the DPRK’s 25 million inhabitants are not connected to the Internet. Televisions are set to receive only government stations. International radio signals are routinely jammed, and electricity is unreliable. Freestanding radios are illegal. But every North Korean household and business is outfitted with a government-controlled radio hardwired to a central station. The speaker comes with a volume control, but no off switch. In a new media age awash in universally shared information—an age of planet-wide instant messaging and texted manifestos—the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea remains a stubborn holdout, a regime almost totally in control of its national narrative.
Given this isolation, it’s even more remarkable that since 2004, a half-dozen independent media organizations have been launched in Northeast Asia to communicate with North Koreans—to bring news out of the country as well as to get potentially destabilizing information in. These media insurgents have a two-pronged strategy, integrating Cold War methods (Voice of America–like shortwave broadcasts in; samizdat-like info out) and 21st-century hardware: SD chips, thumb drives, CDs, e-books, miniature recording devices, and cell phones. And as with all intelligence-gathering projects, their most valuable assets are human: a network of reporters in North Korea and China who dispatch a stream of reports, whether about the palace intrigue surrounding the choice of Kim Jong Il’s successor, or the price of flour in Wŏnsan.
Learning to Love the (Shallow, Divisive, Unreliable) New Media
“One by one, the buffers between what people want and what the media can afford to deliver have been stripped away. Broadcast TV was deregulated, and cable and satellite TV arose in a wholly post-regulation era. As newspapers fell during the rise of the Internet, and fell faster because of the 2008 recession, the regional papers fell hardest. The survivors, from The New York Times to the National Enquirer, will be what British newspapers have long been: nationwide in distribution, and differentiated by politics and class. The destruction of the “bundled” business model for newspapers, which allowed ads in the Auto section to underwrite a bureau in Baghdad; the rise of increasingly targeted and niche-ified information sources and advertising vehicles; and the consequent pressure on almost any mass offering except for sports—all of these are steps toward a perfected market for information of all sorts, including news. With each passing month, people can get more of what they want and less of what someone else thinks they should have.
Dan Rather: Inside Mark Cuban's Gilded Cage
“Rather is 79, with thinning gray hair and more wrinkles than in his CBS days. Two streamlined hearing aids hang over the backs of his ears. But he hasn’t let age slow him down. He’s come here to cover developments in the Catholic priest abuse scandal for Dan Rather Reports, which airs on a tiny independent cable channel called HDNet. His show is a throwback to the comprehensive reporting that was commonplace on television when he launched his career more than half a century ago. Rather and his crew tackle meaty, challenging stories (environmental degradation in Africa, banks that help Iran launder money), often devoting the full hour to a single topic—the show won an Emmy for cinematography in 2008 and another one last year for business reporting. Rather appears as enthusiastic about his work for this obscure outlet as any that he has done in his lengthy, storied career. “Dan Rather is living a dream today,” says Joe Peyronnin, a former CBS News exec who worked with Rather for 14 years and served as president of Fox News during its launch. “He is doing what he wants, and he can cover any story.”
That may all be true, but Rather had expected to end his career at CBS. He’s only at HDNet because CBS jettisoned him following the scandal over his exposé on former President George W. Bush’s Air National Guard service. Mark Cuban, HDNet’s owner, loved Rather’s polarizing image and believed such a huge brand could bring attention to his tiny shop. He lured the anchor to this obscure end of the channel guide by offering him total creative control. Neither Cuban nor his executives vet story ideas or scripts. Cuban just writes the checks and watches Rather’s show when it airs.
Why Does Roger Ailes Hate America?
“For forty years, he has stood astride the intertwined worlds of media and politics like a veritable colossus, making sure the worlds of media and politics stay intertwined, the better to control them. He has used his considerable powers of persuasion to persuade us to elect presidents, and, if they’re not following the “Ailes Agenda,” to turn against them. At seventy years of age, when most hardworking American seniors have had enough of the rat race and are looking forward to spending some more quality time with the grandkids, Roger Ailes is at the height, perhaps the apogee, maybe even — some say — the very zenith of his power. Indeed, with most of the potential Republican candidates for president in 2012 on his payroll, he may be said to be just getting started. Hmmm. Maybe we don’t know this Roger Ailes as well as we think we do. Maybe we don’t know him very well at all, which is, of course, just the way he likes it.
How Sassy (Should Have) Changed My Life
“Sassy began with Sandra Yates, an Australian magazine-publishing executive who thought American teen magazines were “preserved in aspic,” and thought it might be worthwhile to try a frank, irreverent alternative. She hired the 24-year-old Pratt, an Oberlin grad who had long wanted to start a magazine for teenage girls “who felt like they were outsiders, but who could still pass for normal in the high school cafeteria,” girls “who didn’t want to completely reject mainstream culture, but didn’t want to completely embrace it, either.” Eventually Yates bought Ms. “I’m going to prove you can run a business with feminist principles and make money,” she told the New York Times, and even those unfamiliar with what followed might guess that tragedy was welling like a tidal wave in the distance.
The Toppling
“The toppling of Saddam’s statue turned out to be emblematic of primarily one thing: the fact that American troops had taken the center of Baghdad. That was significant, but everything else the toppling was said to represent during repeated replays on television—victory for America, the end of the war, joy throughout Iraq—was a disservice to the truth. Yet the skeptics were wrong in some ways, too, because the event was not planned in advance by the military. How did it happen?
