In my latest for the Guardian, I argue that the FDA’s decision to give preliminary approval to genetically modified salmon is potentially dangerous — not just to human health, but to the very idea of what is food.
Tag: Guardian
B-minus Barack does no harm
In my latest for the Guardian, I survey morning-after punditry following President Obama’s speech on Iraq, and discover that even some of his critics were mildly impressed. The problem is that no one, including his supporters, was particularly wowed, either.
The politics of white backlash
In my latest for the Guardian, I take a look at the tea party, the Republicans and the politics of white backlash.
Thursday update: Glenn Beck had some fun with my Guardian column yesterday on Fox News. I don’t believe there’s a publickly available link, but I have posted the relevant excerpt from Lexis-Nexis, along with a retort, in the comments.
Rupert Murdoch’s dubious donation
In my latest for the Guardian, I argue that Rupert Murdoch’s $1 million donation to the Republican Governors Association may backfire on him.
The pain over Spain is easy to explain
In my latest for the Guardian, I argue that complaints about Michelle Obama’s Spanish vacation are just the latest manifestation of a by-now-old ritual, in which the mainstream media allow themselves to be bullied by right-winger activists into promoting a non-story.
No good deed goes unpunished
In my latest for the Guardian, I interview a community activist from New Haven who was recently smeared by Glenn Beck and other cogs in the right-wing noise machine.
WikiLeaks’ uneasy alliance with the traditional media
Why did WikiLeaks work with traditional news organizations rather than go it alone in releasing the Afghanistan war logs?
In my latest for the Guardian, I argue that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange learned from the way he handled the Apache helicopter video earlier this year that sometimes it’s better to be Daniel Ellsberg than Ben Bradlee. And that Stephen Colbert was right.
Making sense of the WikiLeaks documents
Like just about everyone else in the media world, I’m trying to make sense today of the WikiLeaks documents, the Pentagon Papers of our time.
The documents — reported by the New York Times, the Guardian and Der Spiegel — show that the war in Afghanistan has been undermined by untrustworthy “friends” in the Pakistani intelligence service, chaos and duplicity in Afghanistan, and mistakes by American and allied forces leading to civilian casualties.
In a sense, it’s nothing we didn’t know, and the White House argues that the situation has been improving since President Obama charted his own course. (The most recent documents in the cache are from December 2009.) Still, like the Pentagon Papers, the documents offer official confirmation that things are (or at least were) as bad as we feared, if not worse.
I think WikiLeaks’ strategy of giving the three Western news organizations a month to go over the documents before making them public was brilliant. Earlier this year, WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange, got a lot of attention over a video it had obtained of an American helicopter firing on civilians in Iraq, including two Reuters freelancers. Ultimately, though, it proved to be the wrong kind of attention — the heavy-handed editing made it appear more like an anti-American propaganda film than documentary evidence. (WikiLeaks also released a longer, unedited version.)
By contrast, in providing the latest documents to news organizations, Assange was able to get out of the way and let credible journalists tell the story. Jay Rosen, in a characteristically thoughtful post about WikiLeaks (“the world’s first stateless news organization”), thinks Assange did it because he knew the story wouldn’t get the attention it deserved unless the traditional media could break it.
I don’t disagree, but I think a more important reason is that the public will take it more seriously.
Also: At the Nation, Greg Mitchell has been rounding up links about the WikiLeaks story here and here.
A first-rate overview of journalism’s fate
The week’s best listen is NPR’s “On the Media,” which weighs in with a special program on the future of the newspaper business. At least that’s what they call it, but the show is really broader than that, hitting all the right themes on the fate of professional journalism.
Among the topics: whether the government should play a role in saving the news business; whether newspapers should charge for online content (a tired topic brought to life by a smart interview with one of my über-bosses, Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger); a conversation with James Fallows of the Atlantic about his recent article on Google’s news initiatives; and whether a renewed focus on local news will help bolster newspapers’ bottom lines.
Grab the MP3 and listen. It’s as good an overview as I’ve come across in recent months.
Elena Kagan’s First Amendment moment
I’ve got a piece up at the Guardian on Tuesday’s federal appeals court decision overturning an FCC rule regulating indecent content. And I argue that it may be a major First Amendment test for the U.S. Supreme Court and its soon-to-be newest member, Elena Kagan.