On the Media

Numbers justify fear. 50,000 abducted children, for example, or 50,000 predators prowling for kids online. That last figure was once touted by the NBC show "Dateline." But where did it come from? As this piece from 2006 points out, 50,000 is something ...
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This week, the Librarian of Congress ruled that “jailbreaking” your smart phone is not a violation of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. Many in the tech world cheered, but Jonathan Zittrain of Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society sa...
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Columbia University professor Alan Brinkley argues that Luce didn't so much betray his partner as make a typical business decision after Hadden's death. In his new biography, The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century, Brinkley discusses what m...
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WikiLeaks leaked the biggest collection of classified documents in U.S. history, a fact that should make government-transparency advocates proud. But even some of WikiLeaks most likely allies have mixed feelings about precisely how this leak took place...
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Present and future business models for monetizing the newspaper industry has a new theme song, as decided by you (or someone like you who decided to vote). Brooke announces the winner.
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The WikiLeaks document dump, the politics of numbers and Henry Luce
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The name Henry R. Luce is firmly enshrined in the annals of American publishing. But few remember the legendary Time editor’s erstwhile partner, Briton Hadden. It was Hadden, not Luce, who conceived the idea not only of Time, but of the "newsmagazine...
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Having been in Afghanistan with Echo Company, 2nd Battalion, 8th Marines last August, Wired reporter Noah Shachtman found that the full picture of that time is missing from the intra-military communication leaked by WikiLeaks. Shachtman explains how a ...
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Numbers we encounter in the media are often, to say the least, untrustworthy. Some, like casualty figures in Darfur, may be deflated, some, like the street value of drugs, may be inflated, and still others are simply pulled by institutions out of thin ...
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Brooke weighs in on the taking out of context, then firing, then attempted re-hiring of US Department of Agriculture employee Shirley Sherrod.
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