Media

AUSTIN, TX - In the wake of the industrial explosion that shattered the town of West, TX, earlier this year, leveling buildings and killing 15 people, much media coverage was shot through with repetitions of error, rash conclusions, and other flaws. Against that backdrop The Dallas Morning News stood out with reporting and commentary that was balanced and careful...

by Amanda Zamora and Al Shaw

The Obama administration’s take on transparency can be rather opaque. Send us your most memorable FOIA documents for our Redaction Classics collection.

Most criminal defendants, whether fighting a DUI or fighting Computer Fraud and Abuse Act charges, have a small legal team, often just one overtaxed defense attorney. Matthew Keys, the social media editor who's accused of helping Anonymous vandalize the Los Angeles Times' website, has not just Tor Ekeland on his team, but also Jay Leiderman, another lawyer developing something of...

This month, CJR presents "Required Skimming," a daily miniguide to our staffers' beats and obsessions. If we overlooked any of your must-read destinations, please tell us in the comments. --YogaDork: This is the go-to blog for coverage of yoga-world scandals (the John Friend incidents; Lululemon's prejudice against full figures). But YogaDork, an anonymous New York City yogi, also writes posts...

Tor Ekeland works out of the smallest office I've ever seen, in the kind of Brooklyn coworking space where a guy is inexplicably asleep in the common area at 2:30 in the afternoon. The office has three chairs and glass walls and is not much wider than the doorway. There's just enough room for Ekeland, his partner, Mark Jaffe, and,...

by Christie Thompson

On August 28, 1963, hundreds of thousands marched in Washington, D.C., to demand jobs and freedom for Black Americans. Fifty years later, less than half of Americans say the U.S. has made a lot of progress toward racial equality, according to a recent Pew poll. Here's some of the best reads on the ongoing fight for civil rights.

What do you think is required reading on racial justice? Tweet us your suggestions to #EqualityMuckreads.

Tweet #EqualityMuckreads

This month, CJR presents "Required Skimming," a daily miniguide to our staffers' beats and obsessions. If we overlooked any of your must-read destinations, please tell us in the comments. Local Quarterly: Featuring a sleek design bedecked with sharp photographs, each issue includes stories about off-the-beaten-path American towns overlooked by the mainstream press. Most recently? Jersey Shore, PA. Perdiz: Barcelona-based Perdiz...

For the last several months, I've worked alongside law students in the Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project at Northeastern University. I'm a graduate student in the university's journalism school, and I was asked to support the project's investigations into cold murder cases from the civil rights era. The law students' work often starts with a few inches of text...

Markian Hawryluk, a reporter for The (Bend, OR) Bulletin--circulation 32,455-- has written one of the best pieces I've seen in a long time about the ties between the nation's doctors and the pharmaceutical makers that push the medicines we take. The myriad ways drug companies influence doctors has been well known in health policy circles for years. ProPublica has...

Starting in February 2011, as protests in Benghazi evolved into a nationwide insurrection and civil war, both staff and freelance journalists flocked into Libya to cover the rebellion against dictator Muammar al-Gaddafi. For five days in August, pro-Gaddafi gunmen held 36 journalists hostage in a hotel in Tripoli. Then, in October, Gaddafi was captured and killed by rebel vigilantes. "It...

by Cora Currier

Young soldiers at Guantanamo Bay would have been in grade school when the 9/11 attacks occurred. But the government is making sure the terrorist attacks are fresh in their minds.

The FBI now holds briefings for military personnel stationed at Guantanamo about the attacks and their connection to the island prison. Five detainees are currently being tried for their role in plotting 9/11. There are 161 other prisoners there too, about half of whom have been cleared for transfer.

The presentation includes details about the hijackings, videos of the World Trade Center, and recordings of 9-1-1 calls from the towers.

We received eight pages of the FBI’s 17-slide PowerPoint presentation after filing a Freedom of Information Act request. We filed the request after a Huffington Post report cited the briefings, saying they “left many participants in tears.”

  DV.load("//www.documentcloud.org/documents/779125-fbi-gitmo-presentations.js", { width: 630, height: 700, sidebar: false, container: "#DV-viewer-779125-fbi-gitmo-presentations" }); NSA Foia (PDF)
NSA Foia (Text)

The presentation is marked “law enforcement sensitive,” and the FBI said they withheld nine slides to protect law enforcement tactics.    

The audio and video clips used in the lessons were originally exhibits from the prosecution of Zacarias Moussaoui, currently serving a life sentence in federal prison in Colorado for his role in the attacks. (The clips are stored at a court website, which advises listener discretion.)

Spokespeople for the FBI and the military at Guantanamo did not respond to requests for more details about the briefings, so it’s not clear how often they are given, or when they started. The released slides also don’t show anything about current detainees, so we don’t know how the FBI relates them to 9/11.

In his "Stories I'd like to see" column, journalist and entrepreneur Steven Brill spotlights topics that, in his opinion, have received insufficient media attention. This article was originally published on Reuters.com. 1. WashPost reporters: Get a Bezos comment These sentences in last week's Times profile of Amazon's Jeff Bezos beg for a follow-up from the house the Grahams built: "Every...

MIAMI, FL -- The "water wars" are back on. Two weeks ago, Florida Gov. Rick Scott traveled to the Apalachicola Bay, on the Gulf of Mexico in the northwest corner of the state, to announce that his administration plans to sue Georgia over access to water in the Apalachicola-Flint-Chattahoochee river basin--effectively cutting off negotiations between the states and asking the...

Press hysteria about another housing bubble seems to have cooled off a bit in the last few months. Which is good, since we're not in another housing bubble. But once you become convinced that we're in a bubble, you start seeing them everywhere. Take this post by Gawker's Hamilton Nolan headlined "Bubble Watch: Ridiculous Stock Values Edition." Which ridiculous stock...

This month, CJR presents "Required Skimming," a daily miniguide to our staffers' beats and obsessions. If we overlooked any of your must-read destinations, please tell us in the comments. LIFE magazine: The online archive for one of the finest photojournalism magazines ever published. Looking for iconic photos of Marilyn Monroe, the Vietnam war, or the Apollo 11 mission? Start here....

The "rules" under which hyphens are used to connect multiple modifiers, like "well(-)known man," are varied and difficult to remember. Some style guides try to avoid hyphens except when their absence would create confusion: Don't hyphenate "local business owner," for example, but do hyphenate "small-business owner," since it could be read that either the business or the owner is small....

Thanks to The Center for Public Integrity, we now have a substantial story that tells us about the latest Obamacare turf wars. As we well know, turf wars among professionals are all about protecting incomes, and when the bottom line is involved, the fighting gets fierce. This one is over who's best to advise those 24 million souls who will...

by Minhee Cho

High-cost lenders have long offered payday and installment loans to those with bad credit as a quick way to get cash in an emergency without any questions or hassle. But with annual percentage rates that can exceed 400 percent, consumers can unknowingly get trapped in a cycle of debt.

Paul Kiel joins Steve Engelberg on the podcast this week to discuss his series investigating high-cost lenders, the difference between payday and installment loans, and how the industry has managed to survive in state after state despite attempts to ban these products.

You can read more about high-cost lenders on our series page, Debt Inc. You can also listen to this podcast on iTunes and Stitcher.

Just recently, the Boston Red Sox's parent company bought the Boston Globe, and the head of the dominant online retailer with many regulatory interests bought the capital's leading paper, The Washington Post. Meanwhile, in a footnote, the Orange County Register's parent was said to have struck a deal to serve as a broker of sorts for the city of...

Al Jazeera joined the American TV lineup last week with minimal damage to the republic. There was no sign of bin Laden, no call for jihad, and no ranting about the evils of the American empire--just a workmanlike recounting of the day's events, interspersed with testimonials from fresh-scrubbed young reporters, most recently employed by local TV stations, telling us how...