Blogging the WSF

All go almost completely ignored in this story meant to garner sympathy and support for the New Orleans cops and court system, which, the writer assures us in narrative form, are vital to the city's ability to function the way it is supposed to: in support of tourists and the good residents.

Law enforcement officials say they are moving as quickly as possible, because they recognize that keeping order in the streets is as critical to bringing residents and tourists back to New Orleans as restoring electricity and [more...]

Instead of -- or at least before -- investigating the full story surrounding Davis's Bourbon Street episode, the AP decided to placing the incident in a different kind of context. And here we see the difference between the "liberal" mainstream media and real journalism. The AP chose to encase Davis's tragedy in a shroud of pity for the officers who carried it out.

Surely there can be no doubt that the police -- like Davis and perhaps hundreds of others who have [more...]

Let's start with the headline (I've double-checked -- this is the original that went over the wire)...

Librarians Protected in Patriot Act Case

Protected? The ruling was that, for now, the plaintiffs (a single library employee and the library for which he works, as far as we in the media know) cannot reveal their identities as the subjects of a secret government warrant demanding information about patron's records. The warrant, known as a "national security letter," was issued without any judicial oversight (the FBI just [more...]

The corporate media are just accepting that once Chertoff passed the power to Brown, it was off his shoulders. Apparently no one wondered how a non-cabinet-level official can be expected to coordinate all federal departments, when he was not even in charge of his own department (DHS), and was clearly unable to even manage his own agency (FEMA).

Anyway, that's what we do at TNS. We rarely point it out, and we're pretty sure lots of times it goes unnoticed; nevertheless, we see our job not as regurgitating stories you can find elsewhere but as "adding value" to them, as [more...]

As government watchdogs, this threw up a red flag for us. Lots of questions were unanswered by the website like: Why did people need to register ahead of time? What was the Pentagon going to do with the information? Would there be background checks, etc?

We thought it interesting that a "Freedom Walk" had so many restrictions and requirements, so we asked Erin to press the Pentagon to tell us why and to get some opinions about it from civil liberties groups.

Erin got basic answers from event organizers about needing to know how many people were going to show up, etc. But she [more...]

I realized right away that Roberts must have met with Bush staffers, if not Bush himself, while he was hearing the Hamdan case. We had reported on Hamdan a number of times, and there is no question it is one of the pivotal cases testing Bush's oddly-waged "war on terror."

I thought, Oh my god, I can't believe this isn't considered a conflict of interest. I'm just cynical enough to think that this was not against the rules, or else how could no one at all be pointing it out. So, without being able to editorialize, all I could do was note:

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Double Standards in Effect

Eric Rudolph is a Christian fundamentalist. Yet the same media outlets that love to point out when a terrorist is Muslim almost universally failed to note Rudolph's extremist Christian worldview. I ran a Google News search for "Eric Rudolph" and turned up about . But when you add the word "Christian" to that search, and the results drop to just more...]

By the time I arrived in Tombstone, Arizona, the media were all over the story. Hordes of television vans and dozens of print reporters from around the country were wandering around, taking notes and asking questions. So from the beginning, to some extent my decisions regarding how to cover the Minutemen were formed by looking at what other reporters were doing, and doing the opposite. The constant question in my head was: how can I make sure I’m not wasting my time and just writing an identical story? What can I try to accomplish that the others aren’t? Who can I go talk to that is being [more...]

FACT: Robert Novak was the journalist who blew Plame's cover.

OBVIOUS: He and his sources exposed Plame in order to punish Plame's husband, diplomat Joseph Wilson, and to serve as a warning against others who might hurt the Bush administration's effort to build support for an invasion of Iraq.

FACT: Two journalists who know the source(s) of the leak but did not blow Plame's cover are in very serious trouble for not ratting out the fiend(s) who burned Valerie Plame.

ASSUMED: To the best [more...]

However, some parents see nothing wrong with attaching the devices to their children, including Florrie Turner, a school district employee who is working to develop software for the program with InCom, the company that markets the tracking devices and scanning equipment. Turner told the Chronicle, "There is no danger or I wouldn’t put it on my son."

We wanted to include the opinion of a parent who thought the ID system was a good idea and hopefully explained why. We do this not as a token means of [more...]

In the case of radical lawyer Lynn Stewart, accused of helping her client (convicted terrorist Sheikh Abdel Rahman) send messages to militants in the Middle East, the intended effect is to frighten defense attorneys out of taking on terrorism-related cases. We are supposed to believe that she was convicted of aiding in a terrorist plot. That the charges have been "trumpedhyped up" in her case is an understatement, though assessing the merits is outside the scope of this [more...]

We began looking to this issue because of an  published in mid-October about how at least seven former detainees had "returned to terrorism" after their release from the US Military prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. When I first read the story, a million questions came to mind. First, the AP reporters who wrote the story seemed to get most of their information from a Lt. Cmdr. Flex Plexico, Pentagon spokesperson. Second, while claiming at the beginning of the [more...]

First I think we should discard the notion that "objectivity" means "neutrality." If it did, it would be impossible to attain. Instead, a useful definition of the term is that one is "outside" the story one is covering. It is not objective to report a story that begins with, ends with and revolves around oneself. And it is perhaps completely objective to report a story that takes place in another galaxy (maybe...). In between, there is nothing but grey area, and don't let any reporter or editor tell you otherwise. I am perhaps less objective on this matter than the Metro editor of the local [more...]