One of the assertions continually made by White House Press Secretary Jay Carney at yesterday’s press briefing regarding the AP Spying scandal was that President Obama believed in “unfettered” investigative journalism. The evidence Carney offered for this assertion was Obama’s support for a shield law that died in 2010. The problem? Obama did not support [...]

Internet meme platform Buzzfeed published a story attacking Michael Moore’s account of the TSA’s detainment of Palestinian filmmaker Emad Burnat at LAX. In the now corrected post Buzzfeed writer Tessa Stuart claimed “sources“ told her that Moore’s account of the incident was “baloney” and the entire matter was likely a publicity stunt for Mr. Burnat’s [...]

Journalism has seen a creeping dynamic of public officials withdrawing into the shadows. Since any comment risks going viral (looking at you, Richard Mourdock), top officials increasingly don’t want to be quoted, prefacing all their media comments with requests that the conversation stay “off the record” so the individual can talk more freely. This happens [...]

Marcy Wheeler brings us the disturbing revelation of a New York Times reporter collaborating with the CIA by giving them an advance copy of a Maureen Dowd column, ostensibly to “check a fact.” Mazzetti’s correspondence with CIA spokeswoman Marie Harf, on Aug. 5, 2011, pertained to the Kathryn Bigelow-Mark Boal film “Zero Dark Thirty,” about [...]

Arthur Brisbane, ending his tour as the New York Times’ public editor, went out with a slap in the face at his employer, suggesting that they reflect a liberal bias. I also noted two years ago that I had taken up the public editor duties believing “there is no conspiracy” and that The Times’s output [...]

Rebekah Brooks and Andy Coulson, two top editors at the now-defunct paper News of the World, have been indicted in the phone-hacking scandal that caused the paper’s shutdown and rocked Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp empire. Coulson, before stepping down last year, was actually the communications director for British Prime Minister David Cameron. Five News of [...]

Journalists on my Twitter feed are already buzzing about the announcement of this year’s Pulitzer Prize awards. This year’s crop actually represents a fair mirror for our failed institutions. Sara Ganim and the Harrisburg Patriot-News won in the local reporting category for their stories on Jerry Sandusky and the sex abuse scandal at Penn State. [...]

Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein sat for an interview at the American Society of News Editors yesterday, and they were asked about how a Watergate-type scandal would play out in the Internet age. They mocked a set of papers from a Yale journalism class, which they claimed said that the Watergate scandal would pop up [...]

Paul Starobin has a piece in the Columbia Journalism Review about financial journalists who take speaking fees from the subjects they cover. And what you learn from the story, in my opinion, is that this is just another form of lobbying. The lineup of writers on financial affairs who have spoken at Wall Street events—and [...]

The Obama Administration has opened the door a crack to the possibility of arming the Syrian rebels: The Obama administration, which has firmly rejected calls to arm the Syrian opposition, appeared at least to allow for the possibility Tuesday by emphasizing that “additional measures” might have to be considered if President Bashar al-Assad continues to [...]

This is really terrible news. Anthony Shadid, a prize-winning newspaper correspondent whose graceful dispatches for both The New York Times and The Washington Post covered nearly two decades of Middle East conflict and turmoil, died, apparently of an asthma attack, on Thursday while on a reporting assignment in eastern Syria. Tyler Hicks, a Times photographer [...]