Journalism

Lots of cultural writing these days, in books and magazines and newspapers, relies on the so-called Chump Effect. The Effect is defined by its discoverer, me, as the eagerness of laymen and journalists to swallow whole the claims made by social scientists.

I said a lot of things, but Cissy did them.

—Alice Roosevelt Longworth

Salon, the online magazine, is looking for a passionate reporter to cover Washington politics. Sounds interesting! Based on this listing from JournalismJobs.com, however, I am urging interested parties to refrain from showing up for the interview carrying a copy of Atlas Shrugged:

Senior writer Matt Labash reveals tricks of the trade in a recent interview with Fishbowl D.C.: 

Any journalist who has ever said anything worth saying—or in my case, more than a few things they regret—is all too familiar with hate mail. 

We recently uncovered a memo, circulated to Washington journalists after the 1994 election, which is again pertinent after November's midterm election. It was published in the Wall Street Journal under Andrew Ferguson's byline and, as the original piece disclaimed, "Any relation to any actual memo circulating in Washington newsrooms is purely coincidental."

Never before have matters of the newspaper business mingled so closely with matters of the heart as in Tom Rachman’s superb debut novel.

What causes Western intellectuals and journalists to suspend their critical faculties and euphorically embrace genocidal anti-Western regimes and tyrants like the Islamic Republic of Iran and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq?

The next time you encounter a learned discussion of 'the liberal media' -- which usually features stalwart denials of political bias, combined with pious invocations of professional standards -- consider the life and career of James Wieghart, who died this week at the age of 76. Mr Wieghart's tenure in journalism was, by any measure, successful, star-studded--and emblematic of the problem of bias in American journalism.