Columbia Journalism Review back issues from May 2004:
A flowering of anger.(Opening Shot)(Editorial)
May 01, 2004 ... Al Hawza was not going to win any equivalent of a Pulitzer. According to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, it printed many false articles accusing Americans of, among other things, intentionally firing a rocket at Iraqi civilians and withholding food supplies. Declaring that ...
A want of skeptics.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
May 01, 2004; ... Chris Mooney was a bit too charitable to the editorial page editors whose editorials on the Iraq war he critiqued when he wrote in the March/April issue that they "could hardly have known that Colin Powell would stake his reputation on flimsy evidence." No, they could not have known that ...
Wrong turn?(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
May 01, 2004; ... As a professor of Soviet history, I was excited to see the article about the controversy surrounding Walter Duranty's coverage of the famine in Ukraine in 1932-33 ("Should This Pulitzer be Pulled?" by Douglas McCollam, CJR, November/December). In fact, I immediately made it assigned ...
TV: hype takes a hit: as sweeps periods do a slow fade, so will scare stories.(Spotlight)
May 01, 2004; ... You've seen the stories: LETHAL GERMS ON YOUR DOORKNOB, SECRETS OF CHILD ABDUCTORS, WHAT YOUR NAIL SALON OPERATOR WON'T TELL YOU, SLEEPING THROUGH SMOKE ALARMS, THE DEADLY MOLD IN YOUR HOUSE, CELL PHONES AND CANCER, or, yikes! YOUR THONG AND YOUR MENTAL HEALTH. Such stories show ...
CNN.(Dart)
May 01, 2004; ... When The New York Times revealed in March that those reassuring TV segments about the new Medicare law were in fact taxpayer-funded Bush commercials in journalistic drag--the segments used actors posing as reporters and were presented as legitimate news in politically targeted ...
The Virginian-pilot.(Dart)(Dennis O'Brien)
May 01, 2004; ... On February 1, the paper carried a nineteen-paragraph story, with photo, on the death of Dennis O'Brien, a thirty-five-year-old Pilot reporter who seven months earlier had returned from Iraq, where he was embedded with the Marines' 2nd Light Armor Reconnaissance Battalion. The story was ...
The Roanoke Times.(Dart)
May 01, 2004; ... With fanfare, tax breaks, and a bill of $31.6 million, the paper last October launched a new Heidelberg Mainstream 80 press. Some effects were immediate: blurry photos, wasted copies, infuriated carriers, earlier deadlines, incomplete sports scores, irritated readers, stressed-out staff ....
San Antonio Express-News.(Laurel)
May 01, 2004; ... LAUREL to the SAN ANTONIO EXPRESS-NEWS, for a second rough draft of history. With "regime change" and "nation building" now part of our national vocabulary, the Express-News took on the ambitious task of not only telling, but--more important--showing what those buzzwords actually mean ....
The Denver post.(Laurel)
May 01, 2004; ... LAUREL to THE DENVER POST, for a journalistic bugle call to arms. During its nine-month investigation into the raging epidemic of sexual assault and domestic abuse rampant in the U.S. military, the Post analyzed Army records and Veterans Affairs surveys, and interviewed lawyers, ...
Missing pieces: the campaign conversation ignores media ownership.(Comment)
May 01, 2004 ... A scenario: Senator John Kerry is nominated for president at the Democratic convention in Boston in July. He wins the White House in November--as a number of national polls, at this moment, indicate is possible. Michael Powell resigns as the Bush-appointed chairman of the Federal ...
Corporate priorities: a stark reminder that you get what you pay for.(Comment)(Brief Article)
May 01, 2004 ... The State of the News Media 2004, a sweeping report on the press released in March by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, tells us some things that we already know. Most newspapers and TV news operations are incredibly profitable; the Latino market is booming; the number of companies ...
Red dawn in Dallas: the Morning News has a publisher who wants a 'revolution.' Tough investigative reporting is one of his calls to arms. Will a wary newsroom rise up?(On The Job)
May 01, 2004; ... On the morning of January 22, more than 800 employees of The Dallas Morning News filed into a hotel ballroom to hear the publisher deliver his annual state-of-the-newspaper talk. Jim Moroney strode to the podium, a gangly forty-seven-year-old knot of energy in a powder-blue shirt and a ...
Can the AP go global?(On The Job)
May 01, 2004; ... As the story goes, Mahatma Gandhi was released from an Indian prison in 1932 in the middle of the night to elude the press. He was taken to a remote railroad station where darkness obscured his identity. But then an intrepid Associated Press reporter named Jim Mills appeared out of ...
George W. and the Texas press: is the honeymoon over?(Campaign Notebook)
May 01, 2004; ... George, W. Bush says he doesn't read newspapers. He does, however, apparently read Texas Monthly magazine. In fact, the president of the United States drinks his coffee from a Texas Monthly mug. And with good reason. Perhaps no other Texas media outlet has been more supportive ...
Across the great divide faith; why don't journalists get religion? A tenuous bridge to believers.
May 01, 2004; ... Ash Wednesday was not a good day to eat breakfast and read the newspaper at the same time. Across the country, culture sections fronted a movie still of a man whose skin had the texture of raw meat, his palms nailed to a wooden cross, his head a bloody pulp crowned with prickly ...
Across the great divide class: today's journalists are more isolated than ever from the lives of poor and working-class Americans. So What?(Cover Story)
May 01, 2004; ... In the January 19 issue of The New Yorker, Karl Rove told the writer Ken Auletta that President Bush thinks the press is "elitist," that "the social and economic backgrounds of most reporters have nothing in common with those of most Americans:" For decades now, the political Right has ...
Martha guilty? Surely you jest.
May 01, 2004; ... On a chilly morning in late January, twenty-odd members of the media clutched their press passes outside the federal courthouse on the first day of the most exclusive business hearing in recent history--the Martha Stewart trial. Six weeks later, Stewart, who assembled a billion dollar ...
Ties that bind: Adrian Nicole LeBlanc spent eleven years in the Bronx chronicling one extended family's struggles with urban poverty. She felt right at home.
May 01, 2004; ... Adrian Nicole LeBlanc was two years out of Leominster High School when the suicides began. It was February 1984. Fourteen-year-old Jeffrey Bernier shot himself after school with his father's .357 Colt revolver. By March of the following year, ten more teenagers in the working-class town ...
Brits vs yanks: who does journalism right?
May 01, 2004 ... Objectivity, the guiding principle of the U.S. media, stands accused of undermining the press's ability to challenge the Bush administration as it rushed to war in Iraq. We were too worried about balance, the argument goes, so concerned with giving all sides a say that we neglected our ...
The Pulitzer prizes.(Lists)
May 01, 2004 ... Public Service The New York Times (David Barstow and Lowell Bergman; entry moved from Investigative Reporting category) Finalists: The Courier-Journal (Louisville, Kentucky); The Providence Journal, The Seattle Times Breaking News Reporting The Los Angeles Times staff ...
Letters and drama.(Lists)(Brief Article)
May 01, 2004 ... Fiction The Known World by Edward P. Jones (Amistad/HarperCollins) Finalists: American Woman by Susan Choi (Harper Collins); Evidence of Things Unseen by Marianne Wiggins (Simon & Schuster) Drama I Am My Own Wife by Doug Wright Finalists: Man from Nebraska ...
The duPont Awards.(Lists)(Brief Article)
May 01, 2004 ... Here are the winners of the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Awards in Television and Radio Journalism. Silver Batons ABC News and Ted Koppel for Nightline: Tip of the Spear CBS News, David Martin and Mary Walsh, for coverage of national security ...
National Magazine Award finalists: winners will be announced on May 5 (www.magazine.org/editorial/asme).
May 01, 2004 ... General Excellence (Over 2,000,000 circ.) Finalists Martha Stewart Living National Geographic Newsweek O, The Oprah Magazine Time (1,000,000 to 2,000,000 circ.) Finalists Business Week Entertainment Weekly ESPN The Magazine Popular Science Real Simple Vogue ...
The Quadrennial Sham: the case for truly open debates.(Book Review)
May 01, 2004; ... In the spring of 2001, Newsday began televising live daily business news reports from its newsroom. Charlie Zehren, an excellent reporter with no prior television experience, had volunteered for the job, and a small crowd gathered around to watch his first effort. He was sitting on a tall ...
Showtime in Iraq: the Robbins Follies of 2004.(Theater)(Theater Review)
May 01, 2004; ... Lest there be any doubt about the intentions of Embedded, the new play that opened at Manhattan s Public Theater in March, the playbill, gives plenty of clues. Here is CNN's Christiane Amanpour on the press's "self-muzzling" in Iraq. Here is the London Independent's Robert Fisk on the new ...
Director's cut: did an acclaimed documentary about the 2002 coup in Venezuela tell the whole story?(Documentary)
May 01, 2004; ... In September 2001, two young Irish filmmakers, Kim Bartley and Donnacha O'Briain, arrived in Venezuela with plans to make a low-budget, fly-on-the-wall documentary about the country's flamboyant president, Hugo Chavez. A former army officer, Chavez had attempted a coup d'etat in 1992, ...
One was, two were.(Language Corner)(Brief Article)
May 01, 2004; ... The field was set and post positions drawn," the article about horse racing said. The error is easy to spot in a series consisting of just "field" and "post positions"; not so easy to spot, and easier to commit, as series grow longer. The noun "field" in the first part of the ...
Shaking the Foundation: 200 Years of Investigative Journalism in America.(Book Reports)(Book Review)
May 01, 2004; ... SHAKING THE FOUNDATION: 200 YEARS OF INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALISM IN AMERICA Edited by Bruce Shapiro Introduction by Pete Hamill Thunder's Mouth Press/Nation Books 544 pp. S15.95 paper Here's still another anthology of American investigative journalism. It might be ...
John Edward Bruce: Politician, Journalist, and Self-Trained Historian of the African Diaspora.(Book Reports)(Brief Article)(Book Review)
May 01, 2004; ... JOHN EDWARD BRUCE: POLITICIAN, JOURNALIST, AND SELF-TRAINED HISTORIAN OF THE AFRICAN DIASPORA By Ralph L. Crowder New York University Press 243 pp. $45 The life of John Edward Bruce (1856-1924) spanned the years dubbed by the historian Rayford Logan the "nadir" of ...
Protest and Survive: Underground GI Newspapers during the Vietnam War.(Book Reports)(Brief Article)(Book Review)
May 01, 2004; ... PROTEST AND SURVIVE: UNDERGROUND GI NEWSPAPERS DURING THE VIETNAM WAR By James Lewes Praeger 243 pp. $67.95 This book may or may not be timely. It recalls and analyzes the sudden expansion of the antiwar underground GI press in the late 1960s. Lewes, who has a Ph.D ....
Eats, Shoots & Leaves: the Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation.(Book Review)
May 01, 2004; ... EATS, SHOOTS & LEAVES: THE ZERO TOLERANCE APPROACH TO PUNCTUATION By Lynne Truss Forward by Frank McCourt Gotham Books 209 pp. $17.50 This book is a phenomenon. As its American edition was published in April, it already ranked first on the Amazon sales list in ...
Three stories a day? How young reported learn to skim.
May 01, 2004; ... The story description I'd sent my editor earlier in the day sounded interesting enough: "Two months after the school committee's controversial decision to charge students to ride the bus to school, no one has paid a bus lee in Peabody, and parents are confused." The trouble was ...
Bad circulation: how often do newspapers and magazines goose their numbers?
May 01, 2004; ... During the past few years, newspapers and magazines have devoted millions of column inches to the shenanigans and suspect accounting of various corporate malefactors. But comparatively little attention has been paid to allegations of financial impropriety leveled at one segment of the ...
Dark side of the moon: why a leak from the White House has NASA reporters crying foul.
May 01, 2004; ... It was a classic eye-catching, front-page, above-the-fold story. A Washington newspaper reports that the president will soon announce a major and costly new initiative, in an article full of details gleaned from unnamed senior administration sources. But the story behind the UPI/Washington ...
Captive audience: how technology could free the White House press corps.(A Modest Proposal)
May 01, 2004; ... The White House is a tough beat. The pace is frenetic, the pressure to perform intense, and the spin unrelenting. Within those walls, the press corps--roughly 100 correspondents, producers, and technicians--is a captive audience, tied to the ground like Gulliver and subject to the whim of ...
The power of a press.(Scene)
May 01, 2004; ... Tatyana Goryachova, editor of tire independent weekly Berdyansk Delovoy in Ukraine, routinely confronts obstacles to her journalism that would confound editors in the U.S. Since the Delovoy began publishing in 1996, Goryachova has survived a criminal libel suit brought by the mayor of ...