Thoughts about...Journalism and Media

Washington Post to Readers:
Stop Us Before We Kill Again
Post (war) Partum Depression?

by Terry Michael, March 20, 2007

People! Listen up. If there’s a journalism shrink in the crowd, please proceed immediately to the media tent. The editorial page editors of The Washington Post seem to have dropped some really bad shit on this otherwise fun and fabulous fourth anniversary of their first Iraq war trip. They’re having these, like, uh...reality-based flashbacks about no actual WMD’s, and non-threatening paper tiger thugs, and tribal, theocratic cultures that don’t seem to be into flower power. If you’ve got any anti-anxiety stuff to help ‘em out, man--pills, or whatever--they could really use it. Please help, man. Peace and love. Rock on.

I live in Washington, DC. I know surreal when I see it. And I saw it in vivid blotter acid color this past Sunday on the editorial page of a paper that once helped bring down a president who also undercut America’s moral authority several decades ago.....

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Nieman Reports / Spring 2004
Why Political Journalism Fails
at Handicapping the Race
By Terry Michael
Money, ads, staff and calendar. Those themes dominate much of political journalism in the months before a presidential election cycle really kicks in. And they are pushed by reporters acting as horserace handicappers, trying to determine the main contenders and which candidates have what it takes to win the nomination and even the fall election.

It’s a kind of “supply-side” approach to political reporting. Figure out who has the most money, the cleverest commercials,the most seasoned operatives, the advantages of early caucus and primary dates—and reporters have the data they think they need to predict likely winners....
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The non-debate on the war
Published August 25, 2005
By Terry Michael
"Teach your interns the role of journalists is to question power, not propagate it." That advice arrived recently from retired New York Times columnist Tom Wicker. While Mr. Wicker's words are important for my journalism students, they're a timely reminder for the Baby Boom leaders of America's newsrooms — who should have learned more than they did in the '60s, when the best and the brightest gave us Vietnam. The most influential interpreters of our public affairs are accepting, rather than expanding, a noose-tight frame the Washington political culture is enforcing to limit permissible discourse on the war in Iraq....
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