Columbia Journalism Review articles from July 2002

Columbia Journalism Review archives from July 2002

Paradoxical prize. (Letters).
July 1, 2002... I was struck, as were many around the country's newsrooms, by the historic concentration of Pulitzers in the dominant, largest newspapers this year ("The Pulitzer Gap," CJR, May/June). But among the valid questions you raise, the one I did not...

Missing parts. (Letters).
July 1, 2002... Your illuminating story on the new L.A. Times (CJR, May/June) had omissions sadly typical of such pieces. There was not a word about the sports sections, photography, or copy editing, and a mere half-sentence about page design. The...

My ox or yours? (Letters).
July 1, 2002... So, Chicago journalists are concerned about their police department's new press credentialing system (CJR, May/June), fearing that fingerprinting and background checks will unnecessarily put their fate into the hands of the police, violate...

Mind games. (Letters).
July 1, 2002... In an otherwise fine piece on Robert Caro and the writing of Master of the Senate, Scott Sherman suddenly turns literary critic when he states: "As a prose stylist, Caro is not in the same class as Garry Wills, Norman Mailer, Gay Talese, Robert...

Unpeachy behavior. (Letters).
July 1, 2002... I gather from the caption "Pie Eyed?" on the photo that accompanied the article "The Lomborg File" in your March/ April issue that you were amused by the fact that some clown, identified as a journalist, threw a pie at Lomborg. You should...

Facts and feuds. (Letters).
July 1, 2002... In his May/June profile of Christopher Hitchens, John Giuffo quotes Hitchens as saying that I got "the facts and figures wrong" about the bombing of the al-Shifa plant in the Sudan, and misattributed the estimate to Human Rights Watch. In my...

What `identity crisis'? (Letters).
July 1, 2002... In the May/June issue, CJR gave a Dart to the Daily InterLake for running a guest opinion proposing a four-day work stoppage in an unsigned protest against the Endangered Species Act [and in support of "the eviction of all illegal undocumented...

Poll jumping. (Letters).
July 1, 2002... In his March/April column, Andrew Kohut argues "The Problem with that assumption [of liberal media bias] is that for most Americans political bias in the media is not partisan or ideological. While a small percentage of the public thinks news...

Clarification. (Letters).(Correction Notice)
July 1, 2002... In the May/June issue, a Dart went to The New York Times and Joel Greenberg for a page-one report on a protest by some Israeli reservists against serving in the West Bank. The report, which noted the powerful impact of a resistance movement...

Flora Lewis: reporter. (Role Model).(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... The date was June 4, 1967, the eve of the Six Day War between between Israel and her Arab neighbors. It took no special genius to know that war was looming. Egypt's Nasser had closed the vital straits of Tiran, choking off Israel's access to...

The dilemma: at the office, a spokesman for Israel; in the classroom, a journalist learning to question everything; in the drawer, a bottle of whisky. (First Person).
July 1, 2002... Over my desk at the Department of Media and Public Affairs at the Consulate General of Israel in New York hung a cartoon I'd clipped from The New Yorker. It featured an ox, his eyes agog, his tongue sticking out of his mouth at an impossible...

In review: Al Qaeda's computer. (Currents).(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... A recent New York Law Journal column by James C. Goodale, ex-chairman of the Committee to Protect Journalists, severely criticized The Wall Street Journal for passing along to U.S. intelligence officials hidden al Qaeda computer files it found...

Radio: the rookies.(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... Some of the best journalism coming out of WNYC, New York City's public radio station, is being done by a bunch of rookies. Radio Rookies--the station's three-year-old workshop program that trains inner-city teens to report on their own lives....

History: a reporter remembered.(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... In the historical plaque department, reporters get little respect. When local kids take off for the big time, hometowns incline to forget them. Hawley, Pennsylvania, however, is proud of its journalist son. On July 6, as part of the 175th...

The bracket blues. (Language Corner).(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... Except when excerpting text or in such devices as blurbs and pull-quotes, bracketing material inside quotations is, not to put too fine a point on it, an abomination. 1. Genuinely good quotes are mangled by bracketing: "Our prisons are...

Technology corner.(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... Here are three useful resources worth bookmarking: DISTANCE CALCULATOR http://www.indo.com/distance If you're looking to calculate distances between major cities, you should start with this handy tool, from Bali Online, an...

Cuba: waiting for Fidel's finale.(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... Every six months or so, Vanessa Bauza, one of the few American correspondents in Havana, gets a call from her editors. A rumor is again sweeping through the Miami community of Cuban expatriates: Fidel Castro is dead. Bauza, a reporter for South...

Words: how the west was spun.(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... In a day devoted to celebrating what President Bush called "an entirely new relationship" with Russia, he and President Vladimir V. Putin signed a treaty today to commit their nations to the most dramatic nuclear arms cuts in decades. The...

What's wrong with this picture? (Darts & ... Laurels).(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... * At KENS-TV, the CBS affiliate in San Antonio, reporter Bridget Smith's sweeps-week news story about a "miracle" anti-wrinkle cream included the price of the product, a local phone number for ordering, reassurance by the anchor about its...

The uses of publicity. (Darts & ... Laurels).(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... * When The Virginian-Pilot received a press kit about "Precious Cargo," an upcoming PBS documentary about the first generation of Vietnamese adoptees, in which were featured two local residents who had met and fallen in love on a trip to their...

Adventures in idea-ology. (Darts & ... Laurels).(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... * The big bold idea put forward in "The Ideas Industry" column in the March 3 Washington Post came from the mouth of Robert W. Hahn, identified as director of the American Enterprise Institute-Brookings Joint Center for Regulatory Studies:...

The Jenin story. (Darts & ... Laurels).(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... * With Yasir Arafat charging that during the battle at Jenin, the West Bank camp that is home to 13,000 Palestinian refugees and a reputed training ground for terrorists, Israeli forces had committed a "massacre" of more than 500 innocents;...

No rose gardens here. (Darts & ... Laurels).(expose of group homes for the mentally ill)(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... * It's a sad, familiar story, our inhuman treatment of humans who are mentally ill and poor. Does it need to be told again? Does it still have the power to shock? And, even if it does, will it do any good? The answer, as shown in Clifford J....

Iron principles. (Darts & ... Laurels).(Golf Digest magazine to give more coverage to Professional Golfers' Association Championship)(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... * Thanks to the actions of a teed-off Golf Digest editor, the magazine has taken a more open stance in its coverage of the PGA Tour. As brought to the fore by David Sweet in the SportsBusiness Journal (whose parent company, Advance Publication,...

Media ownership: 2020 hindsight: what if consolidation proceeds to its logical endpoint? A report from a possible future.
July 1, 2002... Pittsburgh, January 2, 2020 Although intended as a joke, the infoterrorist attack that interfered with last week's White House Christmas special was no laughing matter. The old Flash Gordon, sequence that kept interrupting the Defense...

Afghanistan: a nascent free press seizes the moment (carefully). (World).
July 1, 2002... The rebirth of the Afghan media began, ironically, with a bomb packed a news camera by two apparent al Qaeda operatives posing as journalists. On September 9, the bomb, quite possibly a precursor to the events of September 11, killed Ahmed Shah...

Exposure to light: the photographer's eye in a digital world.
July 1, 2002... Of all media, perhaps still photography came closest to showing the truth. The best photographs captured a precise moment, holding it there for inspection, offering each image as a fragmentary symbol of someone's reality. By the nature of their...

Along Martin Luther King Avenue. (Exposures: The Flint Journal).(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... FLINT, MICHIGAN In late summer 2001, when Lisa DeJong approached residents living along Martin Luther King Avenue in Flint, Michigan, the photographer wanted to show what life was like on this six-mile stretch of broken-down street....

Rites of passage. (Exposures: The Boston Globe).(hunting photography)(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... NORTHEAST KINGDOM, VERMONT While photographing the financial collapse of a three-generation dairy farm in northern Vermont, The Boston Globe's Bill Greene came across a cluster of secluded, run-down cabins. Each fall, generations of men...

`With unending grace'. (Exposures: Star Tribune).(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... VESELI, MINNESOTA Doug and Nancy Simon of Veseli, Minnesota, celebrated the birth of their daughter, Candace, in June 1988. But their baby girl soon became chronically ill, unable to recover from common colds and sniffles. The following...

Prosecuting polygamy. (Exposures: The Salt Lake Tribune).(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... SALT LAKE CITY Husband to five women, father to twenty-nine children, Tom Green paraded his life-style on television shows, piquing the interest of American audiences and the county prosecutor, who charged Green with bigamy in April 2000....

Dying from asbestos. (Exposures: The Spokesman-Review).(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... LIBBY, MONTANA In the past twenty-five years, more than 160 people have died of asbestos-related illness in tiny Libby, Montana, poisoned by a blanket of asbestos fibers that descended from the W.R. Grace vermiculite mine that, until it...

Mentally retarded on death row. (Exposures: The Texas Observer).(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... AUSTIN, TEXAS When Doil Lane, forty-one, confessed to the 1980 rape and murder of eight-year-old Bertha Martinez, he crawled into the lap of the Texas Ranger who was interrogating him. At the trial, Lane's defense attorney argued that,...

The world of photojournalism.(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... TOKYO, JAPAN Center for camera manufacturing and book publishing; Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography; Japan Photographers Association; Foreign Correspondents Club. BEIJING, CHINA Foreign Correspondents Club; Chinese...

Mike Levy: seeing Cleveland. (Big City).
July 1, 2002... When the wind comes from the south, airplanes approach Hopkins International Airport from the east, right over downtown Cleveland. When six or seven stack up they form the pattern Mike Levy wants to photograph. He had shot tests so he'd be...

MaryAnne Golon: picking shots. (The Light Box).
July 1, 2002... Last year MaryAnne Golon, Time magazine's picture editor, dispatched some of the world's best photojournalists to cover the border between Mexico and the U.S. The resulting photographs, by people like James Nachtwey, Alex Webb, and Vincent...

Did you run this photo?(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... On September 11 Richard Drew, an Associated Press photographer for thirty-two years, was near the north tower of the World Trade Center when he saw, through his camera lens, a tall, dark-skinned man in a white jacket and black pants falling...

Ron Haviv: shooting war. (In The War Zone).
July 1, 2002... Hiding between a cab and the trailer of an abandoned truck, Ron Haviv looked through the lens of his camera as the rifles fired and the blood spilled. Zeljko Raznatovic, the notorious Serbian militia leader better known as Arkan, was...

War photographers and stress.(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... In May 2000, we embarked on a series of studies addressing the question of how war journalists deal emotionally with the pressures and stresses of working in zones of conflict. The hazards inherent in this occupation were immediately brought...

Andre Lambertson: engaging the world. (The Edge).
July 1, 2002... Six months after graduating from the International Center of Photography, Andre Lambertson pawned two of his cameras. His first year out of school was a rough one, and the work came in fits and starts. But he kept one, and he continued to work...

Gail Fisher: moving pictures. (The Frontier).
July 1, 2002... In the world of photojournalism, some long-standing boundaries are being breached--often with surprising results. In early 2000, Gail Fisher, a senior photo editor at the Los Angeles Times, became fascinated with the plight of the nation's...

David Pierini: stopping time. (Small Town).
July 1, 2002... On David Pierini's first day as chief photographer at The Herald in Jasper, the priest sex scandal came to this town of 12,000 in the rolling farmlands of southern Indiana. He found himself in a church in nearby Celestine, tentatively searching...

Digital dangers: the new forces that threaten photojournalism.
July 1, 2002... It has never been easy to make a living as a photojournalist, but shifting market forces and corporate practices, both abetted by changes in technology, are making it even harder. Who or what is to blame? Some photographers focus on Corbis...

Photojournalism on the Web: three models.(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... The Internet makes it possible to publish images with lower overhead than ever before, and some sites have sprung up to take advantage. Whether this small renaissance can last and stay connected to its audience remains to be seen, and it is...

Journalists, Meet your maker.(FROM YAHWEH TO YAHOO! THE RELIGIOUS ROOTS OF THE SECULAR PRESS )
July 1, 2002... FROM YAHWEH TO YAHOO! THE RELIGIOUS ROOTS OF THE SECULAR PRESS BY DOUG UNDERWOOD UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS 384 PP.$34.95 From Yahweh to Yahoo! is the product of one journalist's spiritual quest. As a political reporter for The Seattle...

Remembering Tony Lukas.(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... The discussion over just what "researcher assistants" do for authors, sparked by Doris Kearns Goodwin's plagiarism alibi and explored in Ana Marie Cox's piece in the last issue ("Whose Book Is It, Anyway?"), prompted CJR to ask a former...

In praise of passion.(PEOPLE'S WITNESS: THE JOURNALIST IN MODERN POLITICS )
July 1, 2002... PEOPLE'S WITNESS: THE JOURNALIST IN MODERN POLITICS BY FRED INGLIS YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS 406 PP. $29.95 Once the bombs stop falling and the political dust has settled, how might one go about evaluating American coverage of the war in...

Getting between Covers.(THINKING LIKE YOUR EDITOR )(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... THINKING LIKE YOUR EDITOR BY SUSAN RABINER AND ALFRED FORTUNATO NORTON. 284 PP. $26.95 Lots of journalists want to write books. Some of those journalists think the process is relatively simple. Take an already-published newspaper article,...

Muckraking!: The Journalism That Changed America.
July 1, 2002... Edited by Judith and William Serrin The New Press. 392 pp. $25 paper Judith and William Serrin, both of them journalists and teachers of journalism, have performed a major service in this anthology, retrieving journalism long condemned to...

Looking Back.(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... By Russel Baker New York Review Books. 185 pp. $19.95 Russel Baker began writing essay for The New York Review of Books because, he says, he had spent thirty-seven years writing a column in The New York Times that has always exactly two and...

Jose Marti: Selected Writings.(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... Edited and translated by Esther Allen Penguin Books.462 pp.$15 paper Jose Marti, Cuban revolutionary and poet, died at the age of forty-two in the 1895 uprising against Spain. He was also an independent journalist, and this collection...

Chameleon man meets ticking time bomb. (Reporting).(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... The police arrest a suspect in a shocking crime. He turns out to be middle class, with a legitimate job and without a criminal record. He's a source of instant fascination, so reporters rush to pump his friends and associates for revealing...

Rudy Giuliani, September 11, and the making of a media myth. (Hype).(Brief Article)(Editorial)
July 1, 2002... Quick, name the modern mythological figure: a talented young man of modest origins leaves home on a quest. But what begins as a genuine desire to help the powerless soon morphs into something darker, as the man, through a combination of...

Young people are reading--everything but newspapers. (The Audience).(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... The Pew Research Center's latest news media habits survey has some familiar results about newspaper reading. Once again, fewer people are reading newspapers, and the declines in readership are greatest among young adults and the younger segment...

What's so crazy about a board that knows journalism? (Newspaper).(Brief Article)(Editorial)
July 1, 2002... Should the board of directors of a newspaper company have anything to do with the journalism in the company's newspapers? "God forbid," seems to be the sentiment among some newspaper CEOs. "Of course they should," is the view of others. This...

Naming the problem. (Essay).(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... Karin Dickson lived on the same calm and leafy block of Park Slope, Brooklyn, for twenty-nine years. On March 7, 2000, she vanished. I came to know her about a year later. She stared out at me from a slightly worn color Xerox, a dark-haired...