The second season of the wildly popular This American Life spinoff podcast Serial will reportedly investigate the disappearance, capture, and release of former prisoner-of-war Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl. But you didn’t hear that from us, because Serial’s producers would prefer other journalists not report what they’re working on, because it “makes our job reporting harder.”
Every year since 2007, Apple has held an event to unveil its new iPhone. And every year since 2007, professional technology reporters have fallen over themselves to tell you how Apple’s latest gadget is just like the one you already have, but a little bit better. This version is “not a game-changer,” they’ll write, but it has a slightly different shape or a camera or whatever.
When hackers dumped an unfathomably large trove of internal materials from Sony Pictures on the internet last December, it created a feeding frenzy among reporters—unless you worked at the New York Times, which took a moral stance against touching stolen goods. Today, the Times has a big story explicitly based on material from that leak. So what changed?
What was the lesson of Straight Outta Compton? Was it that... “black hoodlums” are the real problem, in America? If you said “yes,” you could write for the prestigious Wall Street Journal!
What does a grim news story of rape make you want think about? If you answered more rape!, you have a kindred spirit in New York Post editor and brutality fetishist Col Allan, whose paper’s front page today calls for the sexual violation of disgraced Subway pitchman Jared Fogle, who pleaded guilty to charges of child pornography possession and abuse of minors. “ENJOY A FOOT LONG IN JAIL,” the Post crows—a double entendre playing off the size of a large Subway sandwich, a product Fogle has endorsed, and the imagined length of a large penis, which the newspaper hopes will be used to penetrate Fogle’s body against his will while he is imprisoned.
Earlier this year, Gawker Media sued the State Department over its response to a Freedom of Information Act request we filed in 2013, in which we sought emails exchanged between reporters at 33 news outlets and Philippe Reines, the former deputy assistant secretary of state and aggressive defender of Hillary Clinton. Over two years ago, the department claimed that “no records responsive to your request were located”—a baffling assertion, given Reines’ well-documented correspondence with journalists. Late last week, however, the State Department came up with a very different answer: It had located an estimated 17,000 emails responsive to Gawker’s request.
This month marks the ten-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, the storm that ravaged New Orleans leaving 1,833 of its citizens dead. There are a lot of reasonable emotions to feel in response to this particular tragedy—sadness, grief, and anger, to name a few. How about envy? Sure, I guess—so says one brave Chicago Tribune op-ed writer who isn’t afraid to present herself as a potential sociopath in her quest to expose Chicago’s inadequacies.
Gabriel Sherman of New York magazine has a lengthy report about Donald Trump’s tense relationship with Fox News and its star anchor Megyn Kelly, whom Trump recently accused of unfairly targeting him during last Thursday’s televised debate (during which, Trump seemed to allege, Kelly had been menstruating). The internal conflict—placing Kelly and Trump in competition for the approval of Fox boss Roger Ailes—has apparently gotten so toxic that Trump supporters have begun threatening Kelly’s life:
Fox News anchor Bill O’Reilly is currently embroiled in a vicious legal feud with his ex-wife Maureen McPhilmy over custody of their young son and daughter, the latter of whom told a court-appointed forensic examiner that she had witnessed O’Reilly choking and dragging her mother down a flight of stairs by her neck. Now O’Reilly—who likes to position himself as a defender of press freedoms in the face of “spin” from liberal censors—is trying to ensure other details about his conduct as a father and husband are withheld from journalists. It’s unclear, however, how successful his campaign will be.
The media is often granted access to important people. What responsibility—if any—do news outlets have to not be dirty, desperate, pitiful whores in exchange for this access?
Should the published writing of professional writers be subject to any criticism? I believe yes. At least one professional writer disagrees.
Most people would frown upon a business journalist lobbying the mayor of New York City over a political issue on behalf of a corporation she covers. CNBC’s Amanda Drury doesn’t see the big deal.
