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from Jack Shafer:
Why the underwear-bomber leak infuriated the Obama administration
Journalists gasp and growl whenever prosecutors issue lawful subpoenas ordering them to divulge their confidential sources or to turn over potential evidence, such as notes, video outtakes or other records. It's an attack on the First Amendment, It's an attack on the First Amendment, It's an attack on the First Amendment, journalists and their lawyers chant. Those chants were heard this week, as it was revealed that Department of Justice prosecutors had seized two months’ worth of records from 20 office, home and cell phone lines used by Associated Press journalists in their investigation into the Yemen underwear-bomber leaks.
First Amendment radicals — I count myself among them — resist any and all such intrusions: You can't very well have a free press if every unpublished act of journalism can be co-opted by cops, prosecutors and defense attorneys. First Amendment attorney Floyd Abrams speaks for most journalists when he denounces the "breathtaking scope" of the AP subpoenas. But the press's reflexive protests can prevent it from seeing the story in full, which I think is the case in the current leaks investigation.
(Disclosure: About 50 news organizations, including my employer, Reuters, sent a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder objecting to the subpoenas.)
The Obama administration has already used the Espionage Act to prosecute more government officials for leaking than all of his predecessors put together, but we shouldn't automatically lump its pursuit of the underwear-bomb leaker in with those cases. Perhaps this investigation is chasing an extra-extraordinary leak, and the underwear-bomber leak is but one of the drops.
from Jack Shafer:
The dumb war on political intelligence
For as long as legislative and regulatory acts have moved financial markets, investors and their operatives have scrummed like Komodo dragons for first bites of the fresh laws and orders dispensed by government. The stampede for the timeliest legal and regulatory information has given rise to the "political intelligence" business, which converts Capitol Hill whispers into stock market gains, and which has now attracted the full scrutiny of Congress and the regulatory apparatus.
Although legislators and regulators previously sought to hobble political-intelligence operatives, their efforts were stoked by a Capitol Hill leak about Medicare policy on April 1 that reached Height Securities — a political intelligence outfit — which in turned relayed the information to its clients in a 75-word note about 35 minutes prior to the official announcement. Clients acted on the tip, goosing skyward the price of such health insurance company stocks as Aetna, Health Net and Humana.
from Jack Shafer:
Who’s afraid of the Koch brothers?
The thought of the Koch brothers purchasing the Los Angeles Times so distressed staffers attending a recent in-house award ceremony that half of them raised their hands when asked if they would quit their jobs should the paper -- which has come out of bankruptcy court and is very much for sale -- fall into the two oil billionaires' portfolio, the Huffington Post reported recently.
The unscientific show of hands indicated greater newsroom hostility for the Kochs, who have never owned a daily newspaper, than for Rupert Murdoch, journalism's usual whipping boy, who has owned dozens of papers and rarely shied from using them to advance his business interests: Only a "few people" promised to throw themselves out the window if Murdoch wins the Los Angeles Times.
from India Insight:
Journalist Sardesai sours on Twitter: “Had hoped to interact; failed.”
(The following post contains some essential Hindi translation help from my colleagues Arnika Thakur, Suraj Balakrishnan and Havovi Cooper. Any remaining errors or lack of precision are my fault as I reviewed and participated in all translations. Additionally, any opinions here are those of the author, and not necessarily those of Thomson Reuters Corp.)
From the desk of Rajdeep Sardesai, editor in chief of Indian news network IBN Live (I stitched these sentences together from his Twitter account):
from Jack Shafer:
Our national pastime: Press criticism
In early 1946, Albert Camus emptied into New Yorker press critic A.J. Liebling's ear his plan for a new newspaper.
“It would be a critical newspaper, to be published one hour after the first editions of the other papers, twice a day, morning and evening,” said Camus, who knew a thing or two about journalism, having recently resigned his editorship of the Paris daily Combat.
from David Rohde:
Anthony Lewis and the need for journalism that inspires
At 10:00am on Monday morning, I read on Twitter that Anthony Lewis, the revered New York Times legal writer and columnist, had died at age 85. A few minutes later, I sent out a Tweet calling him “a giant of journalism who saved Gideon & Bosnia.”
The Bosnia reference was personal. Along with writing searing columns that pressured the Clinton administration to intervene in the conflict, Lewis put my family in touch with senior White House officials when I was arrested by Serb forces for ten days while covering the war.
from John Lloyd:
Journalism of the future should be less concerned with the present
A constant and frequent complaint about journalism is that it concentrates almost exclusively on what is happening now, and not the future. Why didn’t journalists see the financial crash coming? Why didn’t they know there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq? Why didn’t they warn about Enron’s house of cards? Why didn’t they do more, in advance, on the climate changes that helped cause Hurricane Sandy in the United States last October? Journalists sometimes join in on this to beat themselves up – especially on the Iraqi WMD issue – because they feel foolish about giving credence to claims that turned out to be wrong, or about not asking the right questions.
Besides, the trend in a lot of the media is toward more scandal, more controversy and more opining. There are publications and broadcasts and news agencies (such as this one) that are wedded to objective reporting, investigation and rational analysis, but they are in the minority, and a lot of them are finding it hard to make a living these days.
from Photographers Blog:
Mastering the violin’s making
By Alessandro Bianchi
Although I have often relished the tender melody of the violin, it wasn’t until I met Mathias Menanteau that I realized the endless passion and mastery necessary for its creation.
French luthier Menanteau was born on July 29, 1977 in Vendée, France. He moved to Newark, England and attended the international Newark Violin Making School to garner the skill of making and restoring musical instruments. After being awarded a certificate, Mathias set out for Berlin, where he began working in the Anton Pilar violin workshop. It was in this musically rich city that Mathias deepened and acquired new knowledge on restoration, serving him well for various apprenticeships in Paris and New York.
from Jack Shafer:
Thank the lord the Times isn’t the newspaper of record
The New York Times took a few lumps yesterday from its public editor, Margaret Sullivan, who seconded the protests of “many readers” who wrote to her complaining that the Times was not paying sufficient attention to the pretrial testimony of Private Bradley Manning at Fort Meade, Md. Manning was arrested in May 2010 and is accused of the wholesale leaking of thousands of classified documents to Wikileaks. The New Republic has also taken the newspaper to task for its non-coverage of the hearings, during which Manning described inhuman treatment by his captors.
The Times has not subjected Manning to a news blackout, Sullivan acknowledges, writing that the paper ran an Associated Press story about the proceedings last week and repeating Times Washington Bureau Chief David Leonhardt’s pretty good excuses that 1) the paper does not ordinarily cover every proceeding in every newsworthy case and 2) the paper previously covered (in 2011!) the charges of Manning’s mistreatment.
