Free Speech: Truth’s Only Ally
Despite our keen intelligence and irrepressible curiosity about the nature of the world in which we live, we humans are not primarily truth-seekers. We are a species of social ape,…
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Journalism
15 posts
Vigilance Fatigue: Why Holding Government to Account Is Becoming Increasingly Exhausting
Many people who might once have been activists now engage in political life only passively, by watching videos and reading news and commentary. Moreover, so much political commentary is produced…
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Why Don’t We Have a Spotify Model for News?
I’ve never really needed to pay for my news. When I was a teenager, I’d buy magazines to learn about the latest in gaming, but by the time I reached…
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How Journal Editors Can Stifle the Writer’s Voice
Neither digital nor print magazines have any responsibility to publish everything that is sent to them. First, this isn’t even physically possible. Second, many submissions are poorly written, badly argued…
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Would Hunter S. Thompson Be Cancelled Today?
It’s a strange world. Some people get rich and others eat shit and die.—Hunter S. Thompson, Generation of Swine. The father of gonzo journalism was known for his uncompromising but…
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A Fairness Doctrine for the Twenty-First Century
Michael Goldhaber, who popularized the term the attention economy, said of the US Capitol insurrection: “It felt like an expression of a world in which everyone is desperately seeking their…
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Journalistic Objectivity: What Is True and What Is Important?
The objectivity, reliability and transparency of the news have become hot topics in recent years. Ours is the era of supposedly fake news, in which there is little consensus about…
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Julian Assange and the Cowardice of the Modern Media
Glenn Greenwald, one of the journalists who broke the story about widespread NSA surveillance, recently resigned from the Intercept, the media outlet he co-founded, citing the publication’s increasing ideological homogeneity…
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The Generational Divide and the Death of Dialectic
Each generation goes to battle against the ones that came before. The most recent skirmish on this front has involved a millennial and Gen-Z coalition fighting against Gen-X and boomers.…
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Journalism’s Armchair Psychology
While I’m not sure whether the AP specifically prohibits it, I would like to petition all journalists not to psychologize subjects when they have no evidence for their claims. If…
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Siding With The Audience
A variety of recent high-profile media stories have demonstrated the extent to which news reporting has been altered by the power of social media. Traditional journalism is scarcely recognizable—so we…
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The Emperor’s New Outrage: Why Legacy Media Is in Trouble
New media—news and entertainment entities native to the Internet, whether companies or individuals—are gaining a share of customer attention and wallet at the expense of legacy media—newspapers, television stations and…
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The Dull Art of Problematizing Everything
Few things in life are certain. Some will populate a short list of inevitabilities with death and taxes, but really, only the former is guaranteed—just ask the sitting president of…
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Should Journalism Speak Truth to Power?
If you teach journalism, as I have for several decades at a trio of US universities, you will hear your most engaged students gush one or both of the following…
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James O’Keefe: a Political Activist Posing as a Journalist
There is nothing more “perverted” than to run an interference campaign for a deranged child molester on the basis of his extreme politics, while simultaneously claiming the moral high ground.
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