Category Archives: Journalism

May 20, 2013

‘Unconstitutional’: AP CEO Blasts ‘Abusive’ Justice Dept. in First TV Interview Since Scandal Broke

Posted on May 20, 2013 by ifnm| Leave a comment

“And if they restrict that apparatus … the people of the United States will only know what the government wants them to know and that’s not what the framers of the Constitution had in mind when they wrote the First Amendment,” he said.


In this Sunday, May 19, 2013, photo provided by CBS News, Gary Pruitt, the President and CEO of the Associated Press, discusses the Justice Department’s seizure of AP reporters’ phone records on CBS’s “Face the Nation” in Washington.

The president and chief executive officer of The Associated Press on Sunday called the government’s secret seizure of two months of reporters’ phone records “unconstitutional” and said the news cooperative has not ruled out legal action against the Justice Department.

Gary Pruitt, in his first television interviews since it was revealed the Justice Department subpoenaed phone records of AP reporters and editors, said the move already has had a chilling effect on journalism. Pruitt said the seizure has made sources less willing to talk to AP journalists and, in the long term, could limit Americans’ information from all news outlets.

Pruitt told CBS’ “Face the Nation” that the government has no business monitoring the AP’s newsgathering activities.

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Posted in Government, Journalism, Law & Courts

Breitbart News’ Shapiro Breaks Down AP Scandal (Video)

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Breitbart News Editor-At-Large Ben Shapiro goes over the details of the Department of Justice investigation into the phone records of the Associated Press…

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Posted in Ben Shapiro, Democrats/Progressives, Government, Journalism, Law & Courts

May 19, 2013

In Mexico, fears for democracy as threatened journalists curtail coverage

Posted on May 19, 2013 by ifnm| Leave a comment

A television journalist in Veracruz, a Gulf Coast state with an authoritarian tradition, and where nine journalists have been killed in the past two years, said state officials benefit when journalists flee, taking heat off them for corruption.

Quitze Fernandez, a columnist for the El Guardian newspaper in this capital of Coahuila state abutting Texas, picked up the phone in his newsroom one day.

“Either you come or we are coming for you,” he heard.

Within minutes, he was in an SUV surrounded by heavily armed gangsters. One held a knife to his throat. Another jabbed a gun barrel into his ribs. They said they didn’t like a headline in the newspaper.

They tossed a copy in his face. He glanced down and saw it wasn’t El Guardian. Thinking quickly, he convinced the gunmen that they had mistaken his newspaper for another. They let him go, deeply shaken but alive.

Mexico is easily the most dangerous place in the Western Hemisphere for reporters to ply their trade. Dozens of journalists have been killed or disappeared. Nearly every month, a newspaper or a radio or TV station is firebombed, attacked with explosives or raked with gunfire, targeted by the country’s rising criminal gangs who use violence to discourage reporting the gangsters don’t like.

And the violence has worked. In much of Mexico, local news outlets no longer report on organized crime or corruption. Analysts call these areas “zones of silence,” where the lights have gone out on the dark activities within.

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Posted in Drugs and Cartels, Government, Journalism, Mexico/Central America

May 15, 2013

Progressive Group: IRS Gave Us Conservative Groups’ Confidential Docs

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The progressive-leaning investigative journalism group ProPublica says the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) office that targeted and harassed conservative tax-exempt groups during the 2012 election cycle gave the progressive group nine confidential applications of conservative groups whose tax-exempt status was pending.

The commendable admission lends further evidence to the lengths the IRS went during an election cycle to silence tea party and limited government voices.

ProPublica says the documents the IRS gave them were “not supposed to be made public”:

The same IRS office that deliberately targeted conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status in the run-up to the 2012 election released nine pending confidential applications of conservative groups to ProPublica late last year… In response to a request for the applications for 67 different nonprofits last November, the Cincinnati office of the IRS sent ProPublica applications or documentation for 31 groups. Nine of those applications had not yet been approved—meaning they were not supposed to be made public. (We made six of those public, after redacting their financial information, deeming that they were newsworthy.)

The group says that “no unapproved applications from liberal groups were sent to ProPublica.”

According to Media Research Center Vice President for Business and Culture Dan Gainor, ProPublica’s financial backers include top progressive donors:

ProPublica, which recently won its second Pulitzer Prize, initially was given millions of dollars from the Sandler Foundation to “strengthen the progressive infrastructure”–“progressive” being the code word for very liberal. In 2010, it also received a two-year contribution of $125,000 each year from the Open Society Foundations. In case you wonder where that money comes from, the OSF website is www.soros.org. It is a network of more than 30 international foundations, mostly funded by Soros, who has contributed more than $8 billion to those efforts.

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Posted in Democrats/Progressives, Journalism, Tax, Tea Parties

May 12, 2013

CBS Anchor: ‘We Are Getting Big Stories Wrong, Over and Over Again’

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“Our house is on fire.”

CBS anchor Scott Pelley said at a speech at Quinnipiac University that journalists “are getting big stories wrong, over and over again.”

“Our house is on fire,” said Pelley. The video of Pelley’s speech is courtesy of nowthisnews.com.

“These have been a bad few months for journalism,” he added. “We’re getting the big stories wrong, over and over again.”

The CBS newsreader was quick to take at least partial blame. “Let me take the first arrow: During our coverage of Newtown, I sat on my set and I reported that Nancy Lanza was a teacher at the school. And that her son had attacked her classroom. It’s a hell of a story, but it was dead wrong. Now, I was the managing editor, I made the decision to go ahead with that and I did, and that’s what I said, and I was absolutely wrong. So let me just take the first arrow here.”

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Posted in Journalism

May 2, 2013

Jesse Watters Confronts Celebrities and Anchors About Media Bias at WHCD (Video)

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O’Reilly Factor producer, Jesse Watters, attended the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on Saturday night. In a special “Watters’ World,” he asked celebs, politicians and the press if there’s media bias in America.

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Posted in Bill O'Reilly, Journalism

May 1, 2013

Spanish-language Media Help Shape Public Policy

Posted on May 1, 2013 by ifnm| Leave a comment

“They also keep their readers informed about how the political system works and cover issues that are important to their readers that English-language media are not covering. They also have a better sense of Latino public opinion and help shape public policy on issues that are important to Latinos.”


D. Xavier Medina Vidal

Spanish-language media in the United States play a critical role in shaping perceptions of public opinion among Latino voters and public officials of every ethnicity across the country. They also play a far greater advocacy role for the communities they serve than do their English-language counterparts, according to a University of California, Riverside researcher.

Spanish-language media gather news, do investigative reporting and report on news from state capitals, just as mainstream media do,” said D. Xavier Medina Vidal, a Ph.D. candidate in political science who will graduate from UCR in June. “They also keep their readers informed about how the political system works and cover issues that are important to their readers that English-language media are not covering. They also have a better sense of Latino public opinion and help shape public policy on issues that are important to Latinos.”

His dissertation, “Voces del Capitolio: Spanish-Language Media in the Statehouse,” examines the influence of Spanish-language media on the development of Latino policy agendas at the state level. His research was funded by UC MEXUS (University of California Institute for Mexico and the United States) and involved spatial analysis (GIS), in-depth interviews with Latino and non-Latino state legislators, and data from an original national survey of state legislators.

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Posted in Journalism, La Raza, Multiculturalism

April 27, 2013

Hacked Up Body Of Photojournalist Found In Mexico

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The Committee to Protect Journalists says in its latest report published in February that 12 Mexican journalists went missing in 2006-2012 and that in the same period 14 were killed because of their work. Mexico’s human rights commission lists 81 journalists who it says have been killed since 2000.


This undated image released on Thursday, April 25, 2013 by the newspaper Vanguardia de Saltillo shows Vanguardia staff photographer Daniel Martinez Bazaldua.

The assault on Mexico’s journalists continues as the hacked-up body of a photojournalist and and another young man have been found in the northern Mexico city of Saltillo, authorities said Thursday.

Photographer Daniel Martínez Bazaldua, 22, had recently been hired to cover social events for Vanguardia, the paper said in a story in its online edition. Officials identified the other man as Julian Zamora, 23.

Saltillo is in northern Coahuila state, an area where the Zetas drug cartel is active. Another Coahuila newspaper recently announced it would no longer publish stories about drug gangs, after receiving threats apparently signed by a Zetas leader.

State prosecutors said the bodies were found Wednesday in a jumbled pile of severed parts on a street, next to a hand-lettered message that appeared to indicate the Zetas were responsible for the killings.

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Posted in Drugs and Cartels, Journalism, Mexico/Central America, Murder

Glenn Beck on the CNN ‘Pit of Despair’ and Why He Got Out of Cable TV

Posted on April 27, 2013 by ifnm| Leave a comment

“Most of what we do on television was developed by Desi Arnaz” in the 1950s, he said. “There’s no reason we still do it that way, except that it works. It drives me out of my mind that they are still using what’s called the Desi shoot, three cameras on the floor.”

Glenn Beck thinks the television industry as we know it is dying, but that’s not why he left it to start his own digital network, The Blaze. He’s making a lot more money now than he did at Fox News, but that wasn’t it either. He left to save his soul.

“If you stay in it too long, you become Norma Desmond,” Beck said Friday during an appearance at the NYU Stern School of Business, where he accepted a Disruptive Innovation Award from the Tribeca Film Festival. “I remember feeling, ‘If you do not leave now, you won’t leave with your soul intact.’”

Beck recalled one of his last conversations with Fox News chairman Roger Ailes, his boss for two and a half years. While several accounts have suggested Ailes was anxious to be rid of the controversial host, Beck says Ailes challenged his desire to walk away.

“At the end, when we were leaving, it was a long process,” he said. “Roger said to me, ‘You’re not going to leave.’ And I said, ‘I am.’ And he said, ‘Nobody does,’ meaning leave television….And I said, ‘I’m fortunate because I haven’t been in it that long.’ I knew what this big, huge Fox empire brought to the table, and I had to leave before I became too enamored of that.”

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Posted in Entertainment, Glenn Beck, Journalism

April 23, 2013

New York Times shows sympathy for Boston terrorist suspects

Posted on April 23, 2013 by ifnm| Leave a comment

A New York Times feature story on the suspected Boston terrorists showed Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev in a sympathetic light, with the headline “Far From War-Torn Homeland, Trying To Fit In” and a black-and-white picture of one of the men.

The New York Times: Far from war-torn homeland, trying to fit in. (Screenshot by TheDC’s Jim Treacher.)

The sympathetic portrayal of the men — who murdered three civilians, including a child, wounded 180 people, murdered one unsuspecting police officer and wounded another officer — was met with quick condemnation on social media networks.

Since The Daily Caller’s Jim Treacher took a screen-grab of the article, the Times changed the layout of the page to one more seemingly aware of the hundreds of victims and their friends and families, the entire United States and much of the non-terrorist planet:

The new page does not contain the phrases “war-torn” or “trying to fit in.” The image of a man looking at an image of one of the suspected terrorists is still on the page and links to a boring video about what Chechnya is.

In most news organizations, the layout of an article is chosen by editors, and not the reporter who wrote the story.

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Posted in Democrats/Progressives, Journalism, Radicals, Terrorism