Online Media

In a Monday interview on MediaBistro.com’s weekly video series Media Beat, disgraced former CBS Evening News anchor Dan Rather shared his concerns over the credibility of internet journalism: “The difficulty with some of the things on the internet...is transparency and accountability about who’s responsible for what’s on.”TVNewser.com columnist Gail Shister sparked the discussion by asking Rather…

Tackling "The Myth That Democrats Are Soft on Crime," Newsweek's Ben Adler took to the magazine's The Gaggle blog to critique New York Times columnist Ross Douthat for his latest column. Adler praised Douthat for saying that conservatives need to "take ownership of prison reform" to "correct the system they helped build" but took strong exception to his suggestion that, even so, Democrats "still…

Liberals are so incensed at Connecticut Senator Joe Liberman's refusal to vote for ObamaCare, that they have taken to attacking his wife, who works for a prominent breast cancer organization. Their ad hominem assaults and wild speculation about the Senator's supposedly evil motives reveal their hypocrisy when it comes to political centrists, and their desperation concerning health care…

"The government is increasingly monitoring Facebook, Twitter and other social networking sites for tax delinquents, copyright infringers and political protesters."So ominously began an editorial in Sunday's New York Times.Those with accounts at such websites should pay attention, for according to the Times, and other sources, Big Brother is watching you:

The last two times I remember this happening -- with Jimmy Carter in the late 1970s and New York City Mayor David Dinkins in the early 1990s -- it at least took a few years for exasperated establishment media liberals to blame the system for a favored politician's difficulties in achieving his agenda, and to call the country and Gotham, respectively, "ungovernable." Afterwards, Ronald Reagan and…

A number of the conservative movement's prominent online figures are battling to be the right's equivalent of Talking Points Memo or Huffington Post--political organizations that report hard news. Many believe that to truly harness the power of the Web, political organizations must report their own news, rather than comment on reporitng from traditional outlets."The left needs Daily Kos, but they…

Has anyone else noticed how chilling it has been during the past few days? Not chilly (though it's been that too). Chilling. On Monday, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency declared, in the Associated Press's words, that "greenhouse gas emissions are a danger and must be regulated." The AP, in the item just linked, and many other news outlets carried U.S. Chamber of Commerce President and…

I mean really, what right do we have to expect anything from the world's best golfer except the world's best golf? That was the argument made Wednesday by "Married Jake" of Glamour Magazine at Yahoo's "Shine" site. The item is called "Why Is Everyone Disappointed in Tiger?" (HT Instapundit). In it, jaded Jake jabs at a substantial portion of the public because, silly us, we thought that the guy…

In what is easily the dopiest question I've read from a religion blogger in a while, Chicago Tribune's Manya Brachear closed her  December 8 The Seeker blog post by asking readers if "dissenters" like pro-choice nun Sister Donna Quinn of Chicago "strengthen the church." In November, Quinn went public with news that she has "been rebuked for escorting patients into a Hinsdale clinic that provides…

Battling the "Democrat-media complex" is hard work, but Andrew Breitbart shows no signs of letting up. He announced today in an interview with Mediaite that he will launch a new site entitled "Big Journalism" in January designed solely, in his blunt words, to "fight the mainstream media."Big Journalism will be the latest addition to the prominent network of Breitbart's sites, which include…

Newsweek writer and native Australian Katie Connolly set out to lecture American readers today on the magazine's Gaggle blog yesterday about how Barack Obama's Nobel Peace Prize isn't really about the man or the United States as a country, but rather the U.S. as a lofty ideal -- an ideal she reckons in the eyes of "the collective world" to have been "almost entirely undone" by the Bush…

This is the fifth year I have looked into how the establishment media treats these two topics: The use of "Christmas shopping season" vs. "holiday shopping season" (the AP photo at right uses "holiday" and not "shopping," even though there is a C-C-, Chr-Chr-Christmas tree in the picture). The frequency of Christmas and holiday layoff references. I have done three sets of simple Google News…

Salon editor Joan Walsh, a frequent contributor on MSNBC, finds the network's "Countdown" host to be lacking in the diversity department when it comes to his guests. Of course, her complaint isn't with Olbermann's refusal to feature guests with whom he could have ideological clashes -- something his nemesis Bill O'Reilly has never been afraid to do -- but the fact that his guests are infrequently…

Sarah Palin isn't getting much of a break these days from anyone on the left end of the political spectrum. In the Dec. 9 Washington Post, an op-ed appeared by the former Alaska governor, in which she called on President Barack Obama to boycott the current Copenhagen climate summit in the wake of the "Climategate" e-mail leak. "Without trustworthy science and with so much at stake, Americans…