Doublethink, the official magazine of America’s Future Foundation, carries my report on the role of nonprofit journalism outfits, specifically those based at think tanks. It’s a concept we’ve embraced at Heritage’s Center for Media and Public Policy, working with our policy experts to report on stories that are often ignored by other media outlets. My piece focuses on several shining examples of think-tank journalism, beginning with the solid work of the MacIver Institute and Wisconsin Reporter in the Badger State: Bill Osmulski stepped outside his office into a boisterous crowd …
As governments in the Middle East struggle to come to grips with the surging demands for freedom of expression among their populations, media across the spectrum are coming under attack. Repressive regimes do not discriminate between old media and new. Sometimes the threat does not originate from a government but from counterrevolutionary forces operating with the tacit blessing of officials who turn a blind eye. Reporters without Borders is doing yeoman’s work in day-to-day reporting of these human rights violations. For the U.S. government and for civil society, the important …
Since the launch of Facebook in 2004, social media use has skyrocketed. Facebook has more than 750 million active users, and sites like Google+, Twitter, LinkedIn and Flickr are quickly following Facebook and growing into cultural phenomenons. It is hard to imagine a day without sending a few tweets or writing on someone’s wall. Social media has become a crucial part of how we interact with our friends, community and even run our cities. Governments are starting to take serious notice and incorporate social media into their own day-to-day actions. With …
Last week, just outside Cuba’s holiest Catholic shrine, government thugs attacked in plain daylight a group of opposition women — beating them, stoning them and stripping them naked to the waist. The women, mostly black and middle-aged, suffered this public humiliation because they were trying to find a dignified way to bring attention to the plight of their husbands, who are in prison for freely speaking their minds. The archbishop of Santiago de Cuba has condemned the attack. You can find an eyewitness account in Spanish in the above video. …
Catching you up on clips, commentary and news of the day. Sign up for the daily email update from Scribe. What really is poverty? – Ed Feulner Cubans Still Suffer, But Media Looks Away – Mike Gonzalez Learning from the Bay State’s mistake – James Stergios & Lindsey Burke Getting to ‘Yes’ – James C. Capretta Why I won’t raise the debt limit – Rep. Paul Broun (R-GA) It’s always a holiday in New Hampshire – Grant Bosse Dodd-Frank Rules May Be At Legal Risk After SEC Court Defeat – Lawrence …
Fox News haters are circling in the water so furiously that the sharks are calling their lawyers. The phone-hacking scandal that led to the closing of one of the world’s oldest papers, the News of the World, has shaken Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp empire, and the whiff of blood in the water is obviously exhilarating for his enemies. So we’re visited by that rarest of events: an overseas news story receiving wall-to-wall coverage by domestic news outlets. Any American who hasn’t yet heard that the Murdoch-owned British tabloid hacked into people’s …
Speaking at yesterday’s Bloggers Briefing, conservative filmmaker Stephen Bannon held up a copy of USA Today to demonstrate the challenge of getting Americans to take seriously this country’s debt crisis. On the front page was a banner headline, “U.S. owes $62 trillion.” Underneath the headline and above the fold was a photo of a tearful Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-NY) from Monday’s late-afternoon press conference. The two stories had nothing to do with each other, but no doubt USA Today had an idea which one was more likely to sell papers. “Look, …
A Florida TV reporter this weekend quickly learned that a journalist’s job is not to dig for facts and a beach is no place for a shovel — at least not in the eyes of government officials. Dan Thomas, a reporter at the local ABC affiliate in Pensacola, Fla., took a shovel to the Gulf Island National Seashore to investigate just why BP workers can’t dig more than six inches in the sand to look for oil. Park officials promptly stopped him. “We had come out here to the National …
It gets pretty boring to watch conservatives endlessly complain about a fawning press corps, and a biased media. Yes, a majority of the national media is left-leaning; even they will admit as much. Some journalists put political views aside, and do an excellent job of delivering the news. Others can’t bear to avoid political commentary. You can provide your own examples here. But the problem conservatives have these days can’t just be prescribed to one individual journalist, but more to “group-think” deciding what is and isn’t a national story. And …
Last week, CNN’s Anderson Cooper reported that the federal government was blocking media access to coastal areas around the Gulf, preventing them from taking photos and reporting on the environmental damage of the oil spill. You can watch the video and see Cooper is livid that the Obama administration is treating him and his colleagues this way. Cooper of course compares this to Katrina when media were blocked from…well we’re unsure what the media was blocked from in Katrina, since the photos and video from the Superdome, the Convention Center, …
