Donald Trump and Lying Liars

The media lately has been calling Donald Trump a "liar" in its own voice. That's accurate. He does lie. But does the media want to be in the liar-calling business? What about all the other liars in the world, from Assad in Syria to Vladimir Putin to a whole bunch of CEOs?

My analysis in Columbia Journalism Review, online this morning, can be found here.

© 2016 Gary Weiss. All rights reserved.

The Financial Press & the Meltdown

Dean Starkman's excellent article on the financial press is in the current issue of Columbia Journalism Review, not online at present. It's a detailed and relentless account and I'm sure it will engender quite a bit of controversy.

Dean found that the media "did everything but take on the institutions that brought down the financial system." To his credit, he emphasizes that this was a failure of leadership. He concludes by saying:

...never, ever underestimate the importance of editorial leadership and news ownership, for in them rests the power to push back against structural conflicts and cultural taboos fostered by industry, to clear a space for business journalism to do the job it is clearly capable of, the one job that really needed doing.

Dean does not go into specifics on this point, and I think it deserves another article.

© 2009 Gary Weiss. All rights reserved.

CJR's Audit on ParkerVision Coverage

CJR's Audit section has a smart item today on a short Reuters article that otherwise would have drawn little attention. But Audit writer Elinore Longobardi correctly notes that "it displays two unfortunate tendencies of the business press: to sell short-sellers short and, sometimes, to short-arm warranted criticism of business leaders."

At issue is a tough, sharp article on a company called ParkerVision by an equally tough and sharper reporter at Barron's, my old colleague Bill Alpert. Reuters picked up on the article and, in so doing, slanted its piece in favor of the company.

The Audit observed:

Shorts play a useful and important role in rooting around for, and sometimes detecting, fraud—or at least over-hyped shares among the 10,000 or so publicly traded firms, especially the smaller ones. That’s why some business reporters, especially those with an investigative bent, use them regularly as sources, often with journalistically profitable results.

To be sure, short-sellers are outside the mainstream, and the field has attracted at least its fair share of quick-buck artists and sleaze bags. But an ethical short-seller is on the same moral plane as an ethical long investor.

This is further indication of the change of direction of CJR Audit, which produced a number of strange articles under its previous editor -- sometimes showing a lack of understanding of financial journalism, and a hostility to tough reporting. But this Audit item indicates that the website is being reinvigorated, and quite dramatically, by new editor Dean Starkman. Bravo.

© 2007 Gary Weiss. All rights reserved.



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Wall Street Versus America was published by Penguin USA on April 6.
Click here for its Amazon.com listing and here for more information on the book, from my web site, gary-weiss.com.

Today's Depressing News

Well, not really news, or new -- just depressing. Charles Lewis writing in Columbia Journalism Review:

In the past couple of years alone, everything but a piano has fallen on the head of the serious press: Rupert Murdoch bought Dow Jones and The Wall Street Journal; Knight Ridder, the nation’s most Pulitzer-honored newspaper chain, was dismantled; the McClatchy Company sold the Minneapolis Star Tribune to a private equity firm for less than half of its purchase price eight years earlier; and hundreds of reporters and editors accepted buyout offers at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Boston Globe, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, The Dallas Morning News, the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, and many other newspapers.

Four dailies that have produced inspiring international coverage in the past—The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Boston Globe, Newsday, and the Baltimore Sun—closed their remaining overseas bureaus. In TV, as veteran correspondent Tom Fenton has observed, a quarter century ago CBS News had twenty-four foreign bureaus and stringers in forty-four countries; today, there are six bureaus, none of them in Africa or Latin America. Time Inc., owner of the largest circulation newsweekly magazine, Time, eliminated 650 jobs in early 2006, including those of Don Barlett and Jim Steele, two of the nation’s preeminent investigative journalists, in May. The following week, it was reported that Time Inc. had just paid $4 million for exclusive photographs of Shiloh, the newborn baby of Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt.

It's even worse at the local level. Not long ago I was in Connecticut, back in Middlesex County where I first worked in journalism. The Hartford Courant was still strong, as was the New London Day. But the main newspaper of the county, the Middletown Press, was a horror.

What had formerly been a dull but reliable locally owned newspaper, with extensive coverage of regional news, has become a cheaply produced tabloid with ads on the front page. It is now owned by a New Haven newspaper company, so a large article on New Haven -- which nobody cares about in Middletown, believe me -- was splattered on the third page.

Newspapers are worse than ever, and the reason for that is not Rupert Murdoch or Bin Laden but the greedy publishers who turn good newspapers into mediocrities and mediocre newspapers into dreck.

© 2007 Gary Weiss. All rights reserved.



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Wall Street Versus America was published by Penguin USA on April 6.
Click here for its Amazon.com listing and here for more information on the book, from my web site, gary-weiss.com.