What do you think? Should this photo have been published by media outlets?

News Organizations That Chose Not to Run the Most Horrific Photo of the Dead Syrian Boy Were Wrong

Move over, Jeff Gannon. Matthew Boyle of Breitbart News is ready to assume your mantle as the conservative journalist most likely to win a Pulitzer Prize for his hard hitting, no-holds-barred journalism!

The Right's Most Inept News Site 

Brian Williams also fought in the Civil War. He was under heavy fire.

Very sad for Canada but if you can't have good news, this is how to have the right news.

Canada’s CBC News Shows What Thoughtful Breaking News Coverage Really Looks Like

 aflanigan wrote: 
of all the points to be made, the point of no return is at least important, and at most less than desirable.
So, to make of nonsense more than pointed reflection is a gaudy opportunity for clarity...

 oldviolin wrote: 
But that means that you and I are pointless as well for chiming in on this topic, I suppose.

Maybe being pointless isn't such a bad thing, after all.

 aflanigan wrote: 
It doesn't really matter does it? Well, that is unless there's higher ground with the no-vacancy signs abundant...oh, but that would mean objectivity is vacationing there...maybe? I'm sure the modus operandi of every other adversary are as pristine as are every other practitioner of intellectual darts. IOW, at some point it's all as pointless as gravity in a vacuum chamber. *shrug*

Fox News Reportedly Used Fake Commenter Accounts to Rebut Critical Blog Posts

Wonder how many of them found their way to RP over the last several years, and if any are still lurking . . .

Greenwald deserts Guardian for media co-op | Jonathan Cook's Blog

In the video (above), Jeremy Scahill fills out a little more detail on the new media venture he, Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras are working on. Good to hear that they don’t intend to have a boss or be subject to the interference of editors.

They are obviously hoping to create some sort of journalist cooperative. That’s a model I’m all in favour of, though one wonders what kind of agreement they will need in place to ensure their financial backer, eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, does not have editorial influence.

I find it revealing that Scahill says the three of them have been talking about this for a while, and well before Omidyar approached them. He mentions that the new venture will be “journalist-driven” and not “hindered by bureaucratic institutions or processes”.

The fact that these three senior journalists feel the need to liberate themselves and their work from traditional media organisations more than hints at the restrictions that operate within the mainstream media, even for the most established and influential journalists.

Greenwald, for example, wouldn’t be breaking away from the Guardian if that paper was already offering him real independence.

Glenn Greenwald Will Leave Guardian To Create New News Organization

Glenn Greenwald, the lawyer and blogger who brought The Guardian the biggest scoop of the decade, is departing the London-based news organization, for a brand-new, large-scale, broadly focused media outlet, he told BuzzFeed Tuesday.

Greenwald, 46, published revelations from former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden about the extent of American and British domestic spying and about officials’ deception about its scope. He said he is departing for a new, “once-in-a-career dream journalistic opportunity” with major financial backing, the details of which will be public soon.“My partnership with The Guardian has been extremely fruitful and fulfilling: I have high regard for the editors and journalists with whom I worked and am incredibly proud of what we achieved,” Greenwald said in an emailed statement. “The decision to leave was not an easy one, but I was presented with a once-in-a-career dream journalistic opportunity that no journalist could possibly decline.” (...)

 aflanigan wrote: 
when time allows you should look at politics...

Perhaps there is no other career besides political pundit in which one gets so handsomely rewarded after being so infamously, publicly, and profoundly incorrect.

Fox Renews Karl Rove Contract Through 2016

 aflanigan wrote: 

Something I have been saying throughout the whole election.

An interesting article, their thesis meshes fairly well with the post election articles pointing out how much of the conservative press/media (Fox News, etc.) got the story wrong in the lead-up to the presidential election.  Was the failure to report on the dismal state of Romney's election prospects driven by the desire of outfits like FreedomWorks to make money?

The Conservative Movement is Still an Elaborate Moneymaking Venture

 Umberdog wrote: 

What will I look at the pictures in in waiting rooms?

I started reading Newsweek when I was 10 years old. I know things change but...

Newsweek Will No Longer Be a Print Magazine

Daily Caller Opinion Page An Embarrassing Spectacle Of Conspiracy Theories

Birthers, Billionaires And Fox: The GOP Freak Show In Full Effect
by Eric Boehlert
MediaMatters
June 1, 2012

Of course, this week Fox News gave the billionaires' secretive super PACs a run for their money by producing its own campaign attack ad. Like Glenn Beck's infamous wake-up appearance three summers ago when he announced to Fox's breakfast audience that Obama was a "racist" with a "deep-seated hatred for white people," Fox & Friends debuting its blistering, four-minute evisceration of Obama, complete with jarring graphics and ominous music, will likely live in cable news infamy.

The brash and unethical move, which had been in the works for weeks and was cheered in real time by Fox hosts, represented yet another door the Fox Team has marched through in its unapologetic transformation into a purely political operation. Tired of playing the middle man and increasingly eager to be the origin of partisan attacks and campaign initiatives (not merely reporting on them), the ad was Fox News' not very subtle nudge to the Republican National Committee: This is how you go after a sitting president!...

Fast forward and Fox News is now in the business of producing and airing campaign attack ads. At least most Beltway insiders have smartly silenced their defense of Fox.

But it's not just Fox. What we're seeing unfold this year, and what came into such sharp focus this week with the Zombie-like return of Trump's birther sideshow, is just how radical today's conservative movement has become, and how that radical streak is being championed by the right-wing press, which enjoys unprecedented influence at the highest levels of the Republican Party.

Witness the type of fringe, hate-based bloggers Romney personally met with for two hours last month. Witness the fact Romney refused to even mildly rebuke Rush Limbaugh when he spent three days on his nationally syndicated radio show unleashing a non-stop barrage of sexist attacks against Sandra Fluke. And note how Romney refused to denounce his prominent supporter, and Fox News favorite, Ted Nugent after he unleashed a violent rhetorical attack on the president that earned him a private visit from the Secret Service.

In the context of embracing the right-wing media's extremist side without reservation or concern for public appearance, Romney's decision this week to wallow in the fumes of the birther movement begins to make a little bit of sense.

For some conservatives though, it's all become too painful to watch. Detailing his break from what he calls the "new right" (i.e. Breitbart, Rush Limbaugh, Fox News), former National Review writer, and Reagan administration official, Michael Fumento last week denounced the movement's signature lack of seriousness. He complained that, "Nothing the new right does is evidently outrageous enough to receive more than a peep of indignation from the new right."

Also last week, Atlantic conservative writer Conor Friedersdorf dismantled Breitbart.com's ongoing attempt to "vet" the president, calling it a "case study" in "right-wing malpractice." He dismissed the Breitbart effort as "an utter waste of time."...

 

Michael Tomasky on the Media’s Foolish Elizabeth Warren Witch Hunt
The Daily Beast
May 26, 2012

So now Elizabeth Warren has to prove that she’s 1/32nd Cherokee? The temperature on the story is rising. There was a huge article in the Boston Globe on Friday written to raise a number of questions and suggest that Warren used the minority designation to get her job, or get ahead—exactly at the same time that a poll was released showing that 69 percent of Bay State voters don’t consider her heritage to be a “significant” story. It reminds me of nothing so much as Monica Lewinsky, and of the media’s need sometimes to get a grip...