and now for something you’ll really dig. The much anticipated debut of Robert Scheer’s TruthDig webspace. Content provided by a collection of gifted journalists that dwarf the mini-bloggers out there like myself.
go have a look
“Don’t Bomb Us!” – Al Jazeera Blog
While browsing the impressive, award-winning Global Voices blog, I came across this brand new blog launched this week by three Al-Jazeera staffers. Don’t Bomb Us is definitely worth following.
Tariq Ayoub, al Jazeera’s Baghdad correspondent, was killed by a U.S. airstrike in April 2003. On Thursday, staffers and supporters of Al Jazeera held photos of Ayoub outside the network’s Doha, Qatar headquarters in protest of the memo in which President Bush reportedly suggested bombing Al Jazeera during a meeting with British Prime Minister Tony Blair, according to the London Times. Ayoub’s widow is considering suing the U.S.
The Guardian has a background article on the Bush/Blair meetings that are the source of the memo in question.
UPDATE: British MP and editor of the UK Spectator Boris Johnson is prepared to go to jail for the opportunity to print the four page Bush-Blair memo. Other journalists are set to follow his lead. The world was prepared to slough aside the Mirror’s claims in regards to the memo’s contents until it became clear that the UK has taken extreme measures to protect against the publishing of its contents, threatening jail…. is it only a matter of time?
Tribune’s curious strategies for the future of news
When I moved to Los Angeles in August I fell in love with the LA Times – there actually is a REAL newspaper outside of DC or New York, I thought. I wondered how they could pull off an international grade paper with various nat’l and international bureaus under the Trib Co umbrella (I had previously dealt with the increasing rate of newsworthlessness as a reader of my hometown Chicago Tribune.
Ken Auletta’s piece in the New Yorker a month ago or so made it obvious that I had fallen in love with the LA Times just as the the paper could no longer resist the effects of the slow yet suffocating downsizing of Tribune Co’s newspaper outlets. Alas, not even Dean Baquet would be able to salvage it. My new lover is undergoing a rapid anorexic disformation – under a forced hunger strike.
Still, Steve Lopez exuded award-winning, ambitious journalism with his Skid Row series. A deep search of the web reveals that very little traffic visits the Chicago Tribune’s website for national or international content. On the other hand, the most e-mailed article in today’s LA Times is columnist Tim Rutten’s take on Bob Woodward‘s involvement in the leak investigation. (Rutten was forced off a post as a National editor in a round of Trib Co cuts, only to recreate himself as a columnist, albeit relegated to the “Calendar” section. He has since been named Associate Editor of Features).
LA Times had managed to keep up despite repeated cuts to staffing, maintaining 22 international bureaus, some with multiple staff members, whereas Chicago Tribune currently staffs just12 individual foreign “correspondents.”
Following the bastardizing of the op-ed columnist line-up, abandoning the weekly “Outdoors” section and the launching a Metromix for Tinseltown The Envelope website, the LA
Times is looking more and more like its crippled sister paper.
The choices that media corporations make in the coming years in making a transition to the teenaged generation (the last that will buy newspapers) is not to be taken lightly. The audience is well aware of the multiple options for newsgathering and is quicker than ever to scrutinize sweeping corporate-minded changes that ignore the intellectual and consumer-friendly values of the product. Simply put, content transcends multiple media, but poor quality content does not translate much better – if at all – in different contexts. Its insulting.
A Look to the Future: For the past year or so the Chicago Tribune has highlighted the inside back page of Section 1 with the laughably pathetic ” PERSONALS: WHO’S WHO & WHAT’S UP NAME DROPPING.” Every Day. Section 1.
A weekly column in the Tempo section showed up a year ago as wel, summarizing the content of that weeks’ US Weekly, Star, InStyle and the like. On the front page of Tempo, no less, Its heading: CELEBRITY MAGAZINES: WE READ THEM SO YOU DON’T HAVE TO.
Now, I understand the “what’s going on in the Soaps this week,” and other gossippy columns, that regularly appear in a tucked away but consistent corner of the paper. But to have these 2 regular sections, so prominently placed – and given their bold headings – is just downright insulting.
The Metromix concept is one that the Tribune is expanding, and The Envelope is likely a result of this. Be on the look out in your town.
Finally, and i hate to bring this up, but a friend told me that they’re going to start charging for Red Eye. Red Eye is the 30 or 40 page tabloid roundup of news summaries, sports and entertainment launched a couple years ago in Chicago. Shaped not unlike The Onion, it is filled with photo and graphic-heavy summaries of the news as defined by a high school student, written at a 7th grade level. They have been charging a quarter for it since it launched, at least 2 years ago, and there are cash boxes where its available for purchase right next to The Sun Times copycat Red Streak. But its given away for free everywhere, hence its no surprise that its news if they “start charging.”
As the Tribune Company continues its mission to dumb down society one job cut at a time, while future strategies of any media corporation are trivial and unproven, all I ask for is please, please, please:
A World Championship Chicago Cubs team in 2006.
Only UK press follows Dana Priest’s lead in exposing CIA torture camps in Poland, Romania
Dana Priest left a bold ’emdash’ dangling in the middle of her bombshell expose of the CIA “secret” prison camps in Wednesday’s Washington Post.
Just as every jaw in the land hit the floor she dropped this in the 8th graph:
“The Washington Post is not publishing the names of the Eastern European countries involved in the covert program at the request of senior U.S. officials.”
The reason: “disclosure might disrupt counterterrorism efforts….”
Its not that the Post didn’t know the names, they clearly stated they just wouldn’t print them. A small exchange to ensure the confidentiality of their sources, mind you, and a gold trail from which Joe Journalist could’ve raked up the missing details in his fingernails.
But for fear of following the yellow-cake road.
Priest said this afternoon in a live discussion session at Washington Post.com:
Senior administration officials did persuade The Post not to publish the names of the Eastern European countries we identified. I could say they were not happy about the subject in general, but no one suggested we ditch the whole thing, although I’m sure they felt that way.
The front page article had been on the website for over a day and no broadcast, print or online outlet had anything on the story except a cut/copy/paste including the dead-giveaway “terrorism” insinuation.
Needless to say, it couldn’t have taken much investigation for theFinancial Times
to release (with a WEDNESDAY date-stamp):
A leading human rights group on Wednesday identified Poland and Romania as the likely locations in eastern Europe of secret prisons where al-Qaeda suspects are interrogated by the Central Intelligence Agency.
Its not worth dwelling on the idea that exposing the locations of these prisons would endanger counterterrorism. The fact that dangerous terrorists are already contained within these camps is reason enough for publicity, especially considering the fate of Omar al-Faruq, the al-Qaeda chief who escaped a “maximum security” prison guarded by US troops in Afghanistan.
The real danger is that if the CIA goes on record identifying the locations of their “secret terror camps,” they will be stripped of their freedom to boycott International Crimes Court the U.S> gov’t would be fried.
The outsourcing of detainees to Egypt and Syria is no secret, but to torture prisoners of war in countries that do not endorse torture and have relatively clean human rights records is [insert horrifying comparison here].
This administration will be around another few years, most likely, but we CAN get over Libby, we can FORGET Delay – he’s one of many, and enough ? ENOUGH!! buying into the bird flu nonsense. Haven’t we already learned that it doesn’t matter how much money you use if you don’t have a plan?
Lets kick ourselves and stop thinking twice about yesterday’s news – the media army has alot more influence and independence than our helpless warriors in Iraq. I’ll bet they’re pulling for us now more than ever.
