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Jack Shafer


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Employee/Freelancer/Contractor (past or present) Slate Source Oct 15, 2007

Articles and Resources

Date Fairness.com Resource Read it at:
Oct 15, 2007 What Do Herbert and Marion Sandler Want? Investigating the funders of ProPublica, the new investigative journalism outfit.

QUOTE: ProPublica's Web site claims that the business crisis in publishing has put a crimp in investigative units across the land, and philanthropy is needed to fill the gap....What do the Sandlers want for their millions? Perhaps to return us to the days of the partisan press.

 Slate
Apr 26, 2007 The FCC wants to kill your TV: In the name of saving your children.

QUOTE: One person's example of gratuitous media violence is another person's idea of a film classic, a fantastic war documentary, or a brilliant newscast from an urban riot. But far from being daunted by the perpetual needlework of OK'ing one kind of violence because it's artistic, historical, or newsworthy but nixing another as too wanton, the FCC appears to relish the idea of refereeing all television programming everywhere.

 Slate
Mar 27, 2007 Lies and memories: When stories read a little too good.

QUOTE: ...trouble starts when an enhanced story makes its way into print and collides with the value system known as journalism, as the New York Times and humorist David Sedaris learned this month...On Sunday, the New York Times published an editors' note essentially retracting a sizable section of its March 18 Times Magazine feature, "The Women's War," because one of its subjects ginned up her military résumé.

 Slate
Feb 05, 2007 Spitfire: Vietnam veterans were gobbed on, insist angry readers and critical bloggers.

QUOTE: The idea that Vietnam veterans returning from the war were spat upon by protesters is fixed in many minds....Alas, none of the leads provided to me by readers contains anything that confirms that the incidents took place: I've yet to locate a news account that documents a specific spit altercation or a police or court paper trail that would back the accusations.

 Slate
Sep 05, 2006 Shadows and Blog

QUOTE: So, if Siegel is a cretin for concealing his role in the authorship of Web comments, then so are millions of other posters....Our culture has yet to decide whether Web comments are closer to "conversation" than "publication."

 Slate
Dec 14, 2005 Judith Miller, Interrogator

QUOTE: Should reporters "suggest" questions for interrogators, even questions that reprise questions the interrogator has asked before? Hell, no. If Judith Miller wanted to hear Salah's words for herself, she should have demanded that Rabin authorize a visit in a noninterrogation setting...

 Slate
Dec 07, 2005 Lip-Service Journalism: If protecting sources is paramount, why don't more reporters go to jail?

QUOTE: American reporters have been going to jail to protect their sources since at least 1848....the Washington press corps thinks that protecting confidential sources is essential to doing its job—except when jail time is a possible consequence of doing that job.

 Slate
Sep 27, 2005 "Doomed by Diversity": New Yorker writer Jeffrey Goldberg gets the pillory for something he didn't say.

QUOTE: ...to discuss any aspect of race in this country is to invite an "Al Campanis Moment."... when, by the slip of a tongue or somebody's misinterpretation, a discussion of race ends with the speaker being tossed onto the pillory.

 Slate
Aug 31, 2005 Lost in the Flood: Why no mention of race or class in TV's Katrina coverage?

QUOTE: broadcasters might have mentioned that nearly all the visible people left behind in New Orleans are of the black persuasion, and mostly poor.

 Slate
Jun 27, 2005 Lord of the Pigs?: The New York Times violates its code to cheap-shot director Peter Jackson.

QUOTE: ...shouldn't there be a Times policy against giving a partisan source, in this case a defense attorney, the cover of anonymity to call the plaintiff in a case against his client piggish? As a matter of fact, there is such a published policy limiting what anonymous sources can say in Times articles.

 Slate
May 11, 2005 What Matt Cooper Shares With Yaser Hamdi: A new petition before the Supreme Court explains all.

QUOTE: ...the 1996 precedent Jaffee v. Redmond, which established a new common law privilege for psychotherapists under Rule 501. If the government's interest in prosecuting crime can tolerate psychotherapists refusing to testify before the grand jury about their clients, then it should be able to tolerate the refusal of journalists to give up their sources.

 Slate
Mar 04, 2005 Anonymice I Like: Well, anonymice worth tolerating.

QUOTE: Unchecked, anonymous sourcing allows officials to move government spin into the public domain without any personal accountability.

 Slate
Mar 31, 2003 Sacking Arnett for the Wrong Reason: Having opinions shouldn't be a firing offense. Credulous behavior, on the other hand …

QUOTE: Should Arnett—or any reporter working for a U.S. news concern—automatically be fired for speaking to the state-run media of a nation the United States is trading bullets and bombs with?

 Slate
Mar 25, 2003 The PR War: The general who devised the "embedded" program deserves a fourth star.

QUOTE: By prepping reporters in boot camps and then throwing them in harm's way with the invading force, the U.S. military has generated a bounty of positive coverage of the Iraq invasion...

 Slate
Mar 24, 2003 POW TV: Why Rumsfeld should be careful about lecturing Saddam about the Geneva Conventions

QUOTE: Human Rights Watch agreed with Rumsfeld, chiding Iraq for its treatment of the POWs. But in the same press release, HRW criticized the United States for parading Iraqi prisoners around for the benefit of the news cameras, urging it to stop.

 Slate
Feb 12, 2003 The Varieties of Media Bias, Part 2: The old litmus tests that sort journalists into left and right don't work anymore.

QUOTE: The ongoing sermons about media bias from right and left stink mostly because they rely on the ideological frameworks constructed by the bias-hunters of the early '70s...But the old litmus paper has lost its magic.

 Slate
Feb 05, 2003 The Varieties of Media Bias, Part 1: Who threw the first punch in the press bias brawl?

QUOTE: Political bias—raw and wicked—blights American newspapers and TV news. Upon this bold declaration, press critics of both the left and right are able to agree.

 Slate
Jul 30, 2002 Newspaper War: Why do our Iraq battle plans keep showing up in the New York Times?

QUOTE: Three times in the last month, the New York Times has excerpted secret Pentagon plans to invade Iraq....Are the leaks—and their publication by the Times and other papers—endangering American lives?

 Slate