Darts and Laurels
-
October 07, 2008 09:00 AM
Laurel and Mini-Dart to the Baltimore Sun
Send tips and suggestions to dartsandlaurels@cjr.org
Laurel to the Baltimore Sun for spotlighting abuse and street sales of buprenorphine, a widely hailed prescription drug for treating opiate addiction, in a series of well-reported articles published late last year. And a mini-dart to the same series for ultimately failing to put the “bupe” problem in proper context (see Editor’s Note, page 9).
As the Sun explained, bupe...
Continue reading -
August 12, 2008 09:00 AM
Darts & Laurels
A Dart to the television news industry
Dart to the television news industry, for a shameful nonresponse to serious questions about their vetting of analysts hired to comment on the invasion of Iraq and other military matters.
On April 20, The New York Times published David Barstow’s eye-opening investigation into a Defense Department program designed to influence the influencers. In 2002-2003, as the Bush administration...
Continue reading -
June 12, 2008 09:00 AM
Dart to the Ottawa Citizen
Send tips and comments to dartsandlaurels@cjr.org
Dart to the Ottawa Citizen for a little Canadian logrolling. When the Canwest media conglomerate launched a proprietary wire service and relocated the anchor of Global National, its nightly news program, to Canada’s capital city, the Citizen flooded the zone. On its front page, the paper ran a serious-faced color photo of the newscaster graced by a ray of light,...
Continue reading -
May 01, 2008 09:00 AM
Dart to the Cleveland Plain Dealer and Triblocal.com
Send tips and suggestions to dartsandlaurels@cjr.org
Dart to the Cleveland Plain Dealer and Triblocal.com for shoveling dodgy online content into print. In April 2007, the Tribune Company launched Triblocal.com, a Chicago Tribune-affiliated suburban news site with a small reporting staff and a big appetite for user-produced articles. As Chicago Reader media critic Michael Miner later reported, the site published many glowing articles about Mark Pera, a...
Continue reading -
January 22, 2008 09:00 AM
Laurel to the editorial staff of Stars and Stripes
Send tips and suggestions to dartsandlaurels@cjr.org
Laurel to the editorial staff of Stars and Stripes for uncovering a murky financial relationship between its paper and the Pentagon’s public-relations machine, and a Dart to the publishing staff for signing off on the arrangement.
First, some background. Stars and Stripes is an odd animal. Despite serving a military audience and receiving about half of its budget from the...
Continue reading -
December 26, 2007 09:00 AM
Laurel to The Principia Pilot
Send tips and comments to dartsandlaurels@cjr.org
Laurel to The Principia Pilot for truth-telling under difficult circumstances. When rumors began to circulate that CEO Stuart Jenkins, who oversees Principia College, had been given a big pay raise, editor Caitlin Carpenter began digging. She soon found out that not only were the rumors true, but two trustees had resigned in protest. The resulting January 2007 piece was a...
Continue reading -
October 09, 2007 12:00 AM
Dart to The Oregonian
Send tips and comments to dartsandlaurels@cjr.org
Dart to The Oregonian for rolling over an obvious mathematical mistake, and thereby opening up otherwise admirable reporting to attack. When the paper researched the history of all-terrain vehicles, it found something startling: though manufacturers had made a deal with government regulators in 1988 not to produce ATVs with less lateral stability than those already on the market, the government...
Continue reading -
July 19, 2007 08:30 AM
Darts & Laurels
Send tips and comments to dartsandlaurels@cjr.org
Laurel to the countless gatherers, makers, and consumers of news who over the years have brought to this column, along with their nominations, a shared regard for journalistic ideals and a spirit-lifting faith in the perfectibility of the craft. Meanwhile, for the editor who for more than three decades has appraised those nominations and put a small sampling of...
Continue reading -
June 12, 2007 11:30 AM
Darts & Laurels
Send tips and comments to dartsandlaurels@cjr.org
Laurel to the ethics committee of the Society of Professional Journalists, for refusing to tie the knot without a proper pre-nup. Last August, in apparent recognition of the ever-intensifying relationship between journalism and public relations, the SPJ’s president, Christine Tatum, appeared at a national ethics committee meeting at the annual convention and pressed the committee to give its blessing...
Continue reading -
March 01, 2007 08:30 AM
Darts & Laurels
Send tips and comments to dartsandlaurels@cjr.org
Dart to the Lowell, Massachusetts, Sun, for beclouded judgment. For its December 27 issue, the paper produced a special commemorative section celebrating the fiftieth birthday of Marty Meehan, its hometown congressman—fifty-six besotted pages of gushing articles about the “life and legacy” of the saintly lawmaker, illustrated with more than five dozen photos and adorned with some sixty congratulatory ads...
Continue reading -
January 01, 2007 08:30 AM
Darts & Laurels
Send tips and comments to dartsandlaurels@cjr.org
Dart to the Eugene, Oregon, Register-Guard, for thumbing its nose at the news. Knocking down still further the ad-edit wall has been a series of ads for gamma knife surgery at Sacred Heart Medical Center. The ad on Sunday, October 29, for example, which appeared on page A3, is dominated by a large photo of a partially closed fist,...
Continue reading -
November 01, 2006 08:30 AM
Darts & Laurels
Send tips and comments to dartsandlaurels@cjr.org
Dart to the Palo Alto Daily News, for blindly toeing the local line. “Everybody,” as was noted on Slate’s August 11 roundup of “Today’s Papers,” “leads with the big, foiled terror plot in which twenty-four British men, mostly of Pakistani descent, were arrested and are suspected of plotting to bomb multiple airliners with liquid explosives.” Everybody, that is,...
Continue reading
—advertisement—
Desks
Campaign Desk Politics & Policy
- Baucus Watch, Part III Montana reporter digs deep into the senator’s white paper
- No More Questions A punctuation suggestion for Bob Herbert
The Audit Business
- WSJ Watchdogs Sketchy Conseco Insurance Move
- Ebony on the Fall of Detroit The magazine reports the U.S. car industry’s demise is hitting blacks especially hard