Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Left: Migrant children at a Kansas City detention center in 2014. Photo by AP/Eric Gay, File. Right: Donald Trump. Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty When the Trump administration announced this month it would criminally prosecute everyone who crossed the border illegally, which meant jailing immigrant parents and separating them from their children, it effectively manufactured a whole new…
Last November, Vox published a story by politics editor Laura McGann about New York Times politics reporter Glenn Thrush and what she called his “history of bad judgment” around young women journalists. The story detailed four women’s assertions that Thrush came onto or harassed them, usually in situations involving alcohol. Three allegedly took place during…
Entrepreneur Elon Musk thinks journalism needs fixing, and he’s got just the answer. Enraged last week by negative media coverage of Tesla, his car company, the tech billionaire proposed a rating system in which the public would vote on the credibility of individual journalists and news sites. As with all things Musk, the sketchy idea…
Earlier this month, when Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced plans to prosecute “100 percent” of migrants illegally crossing the Mexican border, it became official US policy to routinely separate children from their parents. Already, hundreds of children have been ripped from their families: 658 kids in the first 13 days of the program alone, Customs…
Most Americans probably don’t know his name, but we sure do live in his world. Roger Ailes — who died a year ago this week — co-created Fox News and fostered the presidency of Donald Trump. His hugely successful media empire billed itself as “fair and balanced” even though it was, by design, a place…
Irony can be a difficult concept to grasp, but some hypothetical examples can illustrate it clearly. It would be ironic, for instance, if people who claimed their free speech was being trampled on were actually being heard more than anybody else. It would be ironic if television hosts and podcasters who believe in “engaging in…
Illustration: Jim Cooke This is the story of how corporate raiding, complacency, excess, and incompetence are gutting a media company that matters to tens of millions of people. It’s not a novel story, and perhaps not even scandalous by the standards of corporate opulence: A shark-obsessed boss, millions wasted on consultants, and an executive who…
Every so often we must take a break from the real news, because something comes across Twitter that makes us scream at clouds about HOW THE FUCK did Chris Cillizza win the Failing Upward lottery to the point that he’s paid what must be multiple hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, when you combine…
A journalism professor at a public university in Philadelphia has admitted to making some of the posts attributed to an anonymous account that spread baseless conspiracy theories and maligned Muslims on far-right sites, according to the school. Francesca Viola, who teaches journalism at Temple University, was identified on Twitter by Joshua Benton, the director of Harvard’s…
googleon: all A Temple University journalism professor has been publicly outed as the user behind an anonymous account linked to conspiracy-theory comments on news websites, and is criticizing the site that identified her. line 459 Francesca Viola, a former reporter for WPHL (Channel 17) and WTXF (Fox 29), was named on Twitter over a comment made on the…