Media

A very long time ago, when I was the manager of a listener-supported radio station, we were planning our annual on-air fundraising drive. “The only thing we have to sell,” one staffer said earnestly, “is our integrity.” A wise guy replied, “What do you think we can get for it?” Thanks to the poisonous blend […]

We used to expect reporters and editors to place events in their proper context. Post-O.J., post-Diana, and soon (we hope) post-Monica, perhaps it’s time to ask: What happened to news judgment?

YOUR NAME HERE As public broadcasting has long shown, there is a thin line between philanthropy and advertising that is well on its way to being completely erased. Consider the recent proliferation of corporate logos on endowed professorships, as reported by the Chronicle of Higher Education. Stanford has a Yahoo! chair of information systems technology; […]

A few years ago, people who thought liberals were too squeamish in public debate wondered how they could make it in the aggressive and strident forum of talk radio. [See Tom DeVries, “We’ll Talk About That: Can Liberals Do Radio?“ TAP, March-April 1996.] Today the same question has come up about another rough-and-tumble medium: political […]

A decade ago, in year nine of the Reagan-Bush era, Paul Starr, Robert Reich and I founded a new liberal journal. The Prospect began as a quarterly, with 2,700 subscribers. Longtime readers may notice a few changes in this, our forty-seventh issue, the first to be published biweekly. 1989 was not a liberal moment. The […]

There was a day not far distant, you know, just before World War II, when nearly all of us news people, although perhaps white collar by profession, earned blue-collar salaries. We were part of the “common people.” We suffered the same budgetary restraints, the same bureaucratic indignities, waited in the same lines, suffered the same […]