By Steve Rhodes

“Journalists have a pleasantly heroic self-image of down-at-heel crusaders dedicated to exposing falsehood, promoting justice and speaking truth to power,” the Economist notes. “But that image is shared by few others: hacks routinely come near the bottom of surveys of public trust, sharing that honor with other perpetual hate-figures such as politicians or estate agents. Nick Davies’s latest book will only stoke such contempt.”
“A long-serving reporter on the Guardian, a British daily, Mr. Davies turns his investigative skills on his own profession. The picture he paints of journalism (almost entirely British despite the ‘global’ in his subtitle) is of a debased trade in which rumor and unchecked speculation often masquerade as fact, where staff cuts mean that vast swaths of national life simply go unreported and where overstressed and underfunded reporters are easy prey for influence-peddlers, liars and con men.

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Posted on February 28, 2008

By Steve Rhodes

“Regret the Error is a compendium of published media corrections, many of them hilarious,” Carl Sessions Stepp writes in the American Journalism Review.
“But Craig Silverman, a journalist who founded the website RegretTheError.com, turns what could have been a sudsy little stocking stuffer into a serious study of why journalists fail so often.”
And they do.
“Various studies show that errors occur in up to 61 percent of all stories, far more than the media acknowledge.”
Far more. Let me tell you what I’ve learned from personal experience.

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Posted on February 21, 2008

By Steve Rhodes

A weekly look at the magazines laying around Beachwood HQ.
Mystery Bombing
“Sometime after midnight on September 6, 2007, at least four low-flying Israeli Air Force fighters crossed into Syrian airspace and carried out a secret bombing mission on the banks of the Euphrates River, about ninety miles north of the Iraq border,” Seymour Hersh reports in The New Yorker.
“The seemingly unprovoked bombing, which came after months of heightened tension between Israel and Syria over military exercises and troop buildups by both sides along the Golan Heights, was, by almost any definition, an act of war.
“But in the immediate aftermath, nothing was heard from the government of Israel.”
Nor – oddly – very much from Syria.

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Posted on February 13, 2008

By Steve Rhodes

A look at the local (and not) book reviews.
Race Wars
“A few years ago, an American lady showed up late at an exclusive Parisian store and was turned away. The outraged shopper was Oprah Winfrey, who charged racial bias; a companion said it was ‘one of the most humiliating moments of her life,'” Orlando Patterson writes in his review of Richard Thompson Ford’s The Race Card: How Bluffing About Bias Makes Race Relations Worse.
“Oprah may have been denied a prerogative of elite status in our new gilded age – being waited on in luxury stores after hours – but had she been the victim of racism?”

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Posted on February 11, 2008

By Steve Rhodes

A weekly look at the local (and not so) book reviews.
Hillary Schmillary
Have any political figures in American history been as thoroughly – and often ridiculously – examined as the Clintons? From Bill’s sex life to Hillary’s laugh, the obsession is beyond absurd.
Now comes Thirty Ways of Looking at Hillary: Reflections by Wome Writers, which is not a wholly uninteresting premise, but also shows just how far behind we are as a nation compared to the rest of the globe’s matter-of-fact history of women leaders.
Thankfully, the Sun-Times’s Teresa Budasi, as she states in her Sunday column, has read Thirty Ways so we don’t have to. (Wouldn’t 10 or 15 ways have been enough?)

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Posted on February 5, 2008