Columns
Pressing Issues
Last night, at the famous Washington gathering of journalists, he sang for his supper. But who can forget another press dinner in 2004 when he joked about those darn missing WMDs -- a low point for his presidency and the U.S. media.
Stop the Presses
News executives should pay attention to what people in the profession are saying when they vent behind the cloak of anonymity.
Pressing Issues
Five years ago tonight, on March 6, 2003, President Bush conducted a televised press conference -- less than two weeks before he would order the U.S. invasion of Iraq. It was the media's last chance to press him on the need to go to war at that time. And they failed.
Pressing Issues
It has always amazed me that critics of the Iraq war, the media in general ? even Democrats running for president ? have made relatively little of the astounding financial cost of the conflict. That may finally be changing.
Pressing Issues
For almost five years, I have been writing about suicides among our troops in Iraq or when they return home. Today, for the first time, I picked up the morning paper and discovered another tragic case close to home.
Shoptalk
While newsprint consumption in the U.S. fell year-over-year by 11.5% overall and 7.1% for daily newspapers inJanuary, the news was not all bad.
Pressing Issues
Wolfowitz told Congress, three weeks before the invasion, that the country could be quickly secured with 100,000 or fewer troops and "spent much of the hearing knocking down published estimates of the costs of war and rebuilding, saying the upper range of $95 billion was too high."
Pressing Issues
Four years ago today, I wrote about a true forerunner in bringing to light the plight of the forgotten injured. "My vote for Iraq reporter of the year goes to a low-profile journalist who did not cover the war itself and has never even been to Baghdad," I wrote. "His name is Mark Benjamin."
Newspaper Beat
Bay Area mainstream media are studiously ignoring the courtroom action in the San Francisco Bay Guardian's "predatory pricing" lawsuit against Village Voice Media (VVM). Judging by the wildly divergent coverage the company's alternative papers are giving it, that's a shame.
Shoptalk
It has been difficult for the press to keep up with all the political, military, and civilian gains and setbacks in Iraq, but now a new "front" has emerged with the Turkish "invasion" in the north.
Pressing Issues
In February 2003, journalists signed on to cover what looked like a certain U.S. invasion of Iraq. Here are some of the hopes and fears expressed about the "embed" process back then by Sydney Schanberg and others.
Shoptalk
Where do we go from here? No one can prove the dean fabricated the quotes, and Lavine can't prove that he didn't. So what now?
Shoptalk
Journalism never seems as glamorous as it does in fiction. The author should know. He collects journo-fiction. Now he asks: Where is our "Moby Dick"?