NewsTrust - Ethics in Journalism - Most Recent Stories: News

The Memory Scrub About Why Ft. Hood Happened Is Almost Complete ... If It Weren't for Archives

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

AlterNet - By Mark Ames - Nov. 24 (News Analysis) - Reading through these credible accounts now, you can see how everyone from the PR flaks in the military to the rightwing machine would want somehow distract people from all the accounts of their pigheaded refusal to exempt or discharge Maj. Hasan, and you can then start to imagine how a lot of editors and viewers wouldn't put up much of a fuss if the story changed to something more palatable to the American public. So with no one interested in protecting Maj. Hasan's motives, and everyone interested in protecting the Army's behavior, the story gets changed from one of "it could have been prevented if Army bureaucrats/officers weren't such raging assholes to Maj. Hasan" to a barrage of leaks from unnamed Army officials, who argued that Maj. Hasan never said peep to anyone about wanting out of the service

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Danger lies in threat to Fed independence

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Washington Post - By Alan Blinder - Nov. 19 (Special Report) - H.R. 1207 seems innocuous enough. The overall question it raises sounds fair: After all, why should the Fed be immune from audit?

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API's Partnership With Newsweek Raises Ad Cash and Ethics Questions

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

New York Times - By Anne C. Mulkern - Nov. 05 (News Analysis) - Newsweek and API have teamed on four forums so far and are planning another -- "Climate and Energy Policy: Moving?" -- for Dec. 1, when the Senate could be holding a floor debate on climate legislation. An invitation sent yesterday to lawmakers' offices said Gerard again would be a panelist and that requests to speak were "currently pending confirmation with notable members of the United States House of Representatives and the United States Senate." Lawmakers receiving invitations included Sen. Tom Carper (D-Del.) and Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

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Why Keep Geithner?

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

MSNBC - By Dylan Ratigan - Nov. 02 (News Analysis) - A year ago it was revealed to the American people that our banking system was a legalized Ponzi scheme in which bank and insurance CEOs paid themselves billions of dollars in personal compensation to lend and insure assets with money they didn't have

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'Fairness' in talk radio

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

CNN - By Carol Costello - Oct. 22 (News Report) - CNN's Carol Costello looks at the idea of a "Fairness Doctrine," being pushed by some Democrats, for political talk radio.

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Axelrod, Emanuel Criticize Fox News: "It's Not Really News" (VIDEO)

Sun, 18 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Huffington Post - By The Huffington Post News Team - Oct. 18 (News Report) - White House senior adviser David Axelrod and Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel continued the Obama administration's criticism of Fox News during their interviews this morning on ABC and CNN, respectively. Both Axelrod and Emanuel cautioned that one of their main concerns is that other news organizations not follow Fox's lead in coverage, which the White House does not see as 'fair and balanced.'

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Ted Turner's Quixotic Quest to Retake CNN

Sun, 18 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

theatlanticwire.com - By John Hudson - Oct. 18 (News Report) - Ted Turner, the Fortune 500 billionaire and founder of CNN, has caused a stir saying he wants to takeover his old company again. After a decade in retirement, Turner said CNN needs to focus on "less talk, more news" and offer better coverage of international events.

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CNN Can't Have It Both Ways: It Can Either Broadcast Hateful Lou Dobbs or Have a Latino Audience

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

AlterNet - By Roberto Lovato - Oct. 15 (News Analysis) - Latinos across America are intensely concerned about CNN's hypocrisy: Broadcasting Dobbs' anti-immigrant extremism while running a Latinos in America special series.

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Iraq All Over Again?

Thu, 08 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

FAIR - By Editors - Oct. 08 (News Analysis) - There have been recent discussions (e.g., New York Times, 9/29/09) about whether the press is doing a better job covering allegations about Iran's nuclear program than they did during the run-up to the Iraq War. But in some crucial and very basic ways, many in the media are performing just as poorly as they did in 2002 and 2003

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ACORN Loses Its Funding From Big Foundations

Fri, 02 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Washington Post - By Susan Kinzie - Oct. 02 (News Report) - The liberal political organizing group ACORN, battered by the release of embarrassing videos and allegations of financial mismanagement and fraud, has also been losing support from several major foundations

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WaPo Reporter Misleads In Claiming Interrogation Double Standard

Fri, 18 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Huffington Post - By Scott Horton Read more at: - Sep. 18 (News Analysis) - This suggests that the message that torture enablers really draw from the West experience is this: Political cards played deftly will foil the impartial administration of justice every time. They may even win you a seat in Congress. Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/09/18/pincuss-double-standard_n_291801.html

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The Story Behind the Story

Wed, 09 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Atlantic Monthly - By Mark Bowden - Sep. 09 (Special Report) - With journalists being laid off in droves, savvy political operatives have stepped eagerly into the breach. What’s most troubling is not that TV-news producers mistake their work for journalism, which is bad enough, but that young people drawn to journalism increasingly see no distinction between disinterested reporting and hit-jobbery. The very smart and capable young men (more on them in a moment) who actually dug up and initially posted the Sotomayor clips both originally described themselves to me as part-time, or aspiring, journalists.

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10 of the Most Obscenely Stupid Right-Wing Conspiracy Theories and Attacks Against the President

Tue, 08 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

AlterNet - By Tana Ganeva - Sep. 08 (Special Report) - thanks to the right-wing saviors of America's youth, a bunch of kids have been shielded from the president's dangerous message that learning things is good. Could this be the stupidest, most irrational way conservatives have tried to tear down Obama? Is it even possible to answer that question?

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Will ‘Astroturf’ Groups Block Net Neutrality Reform?

Thu, 03 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

In These Times - By Megan Tady - Sep. 03 (Investigative Report) - Jim Hightower describes astroturf organizations as “the corporate version of grassroots…well-orchestrated PR efforts that put real folks out front, but are instigated, organized and funded by corporate interests and right-wing front groups.”

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Cheney Still Manipulating People -- Now In Public

Mon, 31 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Huffington Post - By Dan Froomkin - Aug. 31 (News Analysis) - When he was vice president, Dick Cheney got his way by secretly wielding the instruments of power. Now that he's no longer in government, Cheney is still pulling levers and pushing buttons - he's just doing it in plain view. And it's the media that he's manipulating.

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Pentagon Hires Rendon Group to Profile and Rate Journalists Covering Afghanistan War

Fri, 28 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Democracy Now - By Charlie Reed, James Bamford, Juan Gonzalez, Amy Goodman - Aug. 28 (News Report) - The U.S. Army in Afghanistan has admitted it pays a private company to produce background profiles on journalists covering the war. The Pentagon has been on the defensive ever since the Army newspaper Stars and Stripes revealed this week that journalists were being screened by the Washington-based public relations firm, The Rendon Group, under a $1.5 million dollar contract with the military. Documents obtained by the paper reveal journalists were evaluated with pie charts breaking down their coverage into percentages of “positive,” “neutral” or “negative.”

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Cap-and-trade & Health Care & Insurance Reform I see these two issues as one and the same thing. The first one is to heal our planet, and the second is to heal our human bodies. Also, both issues have to deal with how the 'healing' is delievered and wh

Fri, 21 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Washington Post - By Foreign policy, EU news, climate, green technology, health. - Aug. 21 (Investigative Report) - Experts and politicians on whether health care reform will trump climate change.

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Robert Novak Was a Liar

Thu, 20 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Consortium News - By Robert Parry - Aug. 20 (Special Report) - Washington’s punditocracy is in mourning over the death of right-wing columnist Robert Novak, with many warm remembrances about his outsized personality and his supposed love of reporting. But Novak often served as a dishonest propagandist and would have been condemned in a healthy journalistic world.

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WaPo Unleashes Army Of Anonymous Sources To Slag Public Option

Wed, 19 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Huffington Post - By Jason Linkins - Aug. 19 (News Analysis) - I've said for a long time now that the press has long endeavored to diminish the public support for the "public option," characterizing it as one of those foolish and untenable pipe dreams of "the left" when it actually has mainstream support. At the same time, the Obama administration has spun like a weather vane, conveying that a robust "public option" was essential to health care reform on one day, shruggingly suggesting that it would not be all that important the next. In today's Washington Post, we have an article in which they attempt to make these two great tastes taste great together.

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Conservatives push Reagan's 1961 attacks on "socialized medicine" but ignore that he was criticizing Medicare

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Media Matters - Aug. 17 (News Analysis) - On August 14, the Drudge Report, Rush Limbaugh, and O'Reilly Factor guest host Laura Ingraham featured a recording of Ronald Reagan speaking in 1961 against "socialized medicine" for the American Medical Association's Operation Coffee Cup Campaign against Medicare. Neither Drudge, Limbaugh, nor Ingraham, however, noted that Reagan was speaking out against an early version of Medicare, which has become very popular since it was enacted 44 years ago, or that Reagan's dire predictions of curtailments of freedom were never realized.

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Walmart, CVS, Best Buy, GMAC Among 8 Major Companies To Pull Ads From Glenn Beck Show

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Huffington Post - Aug. 17 (News) - Walmart, Best Buy, CVS, and GMAC are among eight major advertisers that have confirmed pulling their advertising from Fox News' "Glenn Beck" program in light of his comments that President Obama is a racist. The advertisers did not pull their spots from Fox News, but rather requested that their ads do not air during Beck's 5PM program.

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ABC's Stossel will reportedly moderate Americans for Prosperity health care events

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Media Matters - Aug. 17 (News Report) - ABC's John Stossel will reportedly moderate three "town hall-style" "health care meetings" organized by the Wisconsin chapter of the conservative group Americans for Prosperity and intended to increase "pressure" on the state's Democratic members of Congress on health care reform. Stossel has recently reported on health care issues on ABC's 20/20, which he co-anchors; that report included criticisms of the purported health care reform goals of President Obama and Democratic members of Congress.

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New Facebook iPhone App ’Pretty Much Done’

Sat, 08 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Washington Post - By MG Siegler - Aug. 08 (News Report) - As one of the most popular applications on Apple’s popular iPhone platform, a lot of users are eagerly awaiting the next version of the app. And that wait is almost over.

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For Media, ‘Class War’ Has Wealthy Victims

Thu, 06 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

FAIR - By Radley Glasser, Steve Rendall - Aug. 06 (Investigative Report) - a new FAIR survey shows that within top national media outlets, “class warfare” terminology is almost exclusively employed to characterize as belligerent actions taken on behalf of the non-rich. The result is a biased national discourse that portrays “class war” as an ongoing persecution of the wealthy at the hands of the poor and working class and their populist leaders.

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Single-Payer & Interlocking Directorates

Thu, 06 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

FAIR - By Kate Murphy - Aug. 06 (Investigative Report) - A single-payer plan would allow the delivery of healthcare to remain private, but the government would pay for it out of a single federal health insurance fund. Like Medicare or Canada’s healthcare program, it would cut out the middleman by bypassing private health insurance companies. But such companies are well-represented on the boards of directors of media conglomerates—a factor that may help explain the blackout of such a popular possibility for reform.

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