Media

My New Roots Run by a "holistic nutritionist," this blog posts inventive recipes, designed to impart a mostly plant-based kind of eating. There are a few health-ified classics, like these no-sugar-added raw brownies. (They don't taste like brownies, but they're delicious.) My Life Runs On Food Writer Sanura Weathers wants to put the well balanced meal...

The Guardian has an excellent and disturbing take on the crash of Nasdaq's systems on Thursday: A series of system crashes affecting Google, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft in the past fortnight has brought warnings that governments, banks and big business are over-reliant on computer networks that have become too complex... Jaron Lanier, the author and inventor of the concept of...

Correction appended When ESPN teamed with Frontline to cover the NFL safety and concussions beat last year, the sports network was lauded for its lofty intent and canny judgment. Here is definite proof ESPN is interested in being a news organization, and not merely existing to promote its broadcast partners, went the prevailing thinking. But then came the inevitable follow-up...

Culled from CJR’s frequently updated “Must-reads from around the Web,” our staff recommendations for the best pieces of journalism (and other miscellany) on the Internet, here are your can’t-miss must-reads of the past week: What I learned from getting shot -- "Defenders of stop-and-frisk and racial profiling have made me break my public silence about the night I almost died"...

This Wall Street Journal day-in-the-life-of story from a couple weeks ago is even more boring than its headline—"What It's Like Being a Middle Manager Today"—suggests. That's right up there with "Worthwhile Canadian Initiative." Here's the lede: The parking lot at Fair Isaac Corp. in San Rafael, Calif., is empty when Michelle Davis pulls in at 6 a.m. For the next...

by Jannis Brühl

Germans like posting baby pictures, party snapshots and witty comments on Facebook just like anyone else. They just do not want to get caught doing it. Many of us use fake names for their profiles – silly puns, movie characters or anagrams and “remixes” of their real names. (Yes, I have one. No I’m not telling you the name.)

We like our privacy (even if fake names might not be the most professional form of encryption). Which is why the revelations about NSA spying have led to a bigger debate in Germany than in the US. It has become the hottest issue during what was poised to become a dull election campaign.

Now there is a James-Bond vibe to pre-election season: Newspapers publish extensive guides on how to encrypt emails. People question whether they should still use U.S.-based social networks. The German government seems to be under more pressure over the revelations than the American one.

What makes Germans so sensitive about their data? Many have pointed to Germany’s history: Both the Nazi secret police Gestapo and the East German Stasi spied extensively on citizens, encouraging snitching among neighbors and acquiring private communication.

But that’s not the whole story. Politics and the media in Germany today are dominated by (male) citizens raised in the democratic West who have no personal recollection of either of the Stasi or Gestapo.

Germany lacks the long tradition of strong individual freedoms the state has guaranteed in the U.S. for more than 200 years. Precisely because of that, these values, imported from the Western allies after 1945, are not taken for granted.

Indeed, there have been battles about privacy – and against a perceived “surveillance state” – in Germany for decades.

While the student rebellion of the late Sixties was partly driven by anger over the Vietnam war, it was also fueled by the parliament considering emergency laws that would have limited personal freedoms. And in the seventies, as left-wing terrorist groups were attacking the state ruthlessly, government answered with then-new “dragnet tracing”, identifying suspects by matching personal traits through extensive computer-based searches in databases.

Many considered this to be unfair profiling. In 1987, authorities wanted to ask Germans about their life – but the census faced protests and a widespread boycott because people saw the collection of data as an infringement of their rights. Citizens transformed into transparent “glass humans” (“gläserner Mensch”) were a horror scenario in the late and nineties in Germany summoned up on magazine covers and in T.V. shows.

Then, there is also the disappointment of the buddy who realizes he is not, as he thought, one of the strongest guys’ best friend.

The oft-celebrated partnership with the U.S. served as a pillar of Germanys’ comeback in international politics after the war and the Holocaust. Now it turns out Germany is not only ally, but also target. According to documents Edward Snowden disclosed, 500 million pieces of phone and email metadata from Germany are collected each month by the NSA – more than in any other EU country.

The outrage at the U.S.’s snooping has continued despite a follow-on revelation that it was actually the German secret service, the BND, that handed over the data to the NSA. (The BND said that no communication by German citizens was collected.)

The German debate also has to be understood as being fueled by a widespread but low-level Anti-Americanism, an ugly staple of the German left as well as the right. The short-lived love for Obama (200,000 people celebrated him during his Berlin speech in 2008) was an exception to the widespread perception of American hubris and imperialism. Germans have managed to live with the cognitive dissonance of protesting U.S. interventions while embracing Californian culture, rap music and even Tom Cruise.

Jakob Augstein, columnist for the countries’ biggest news site Spiegel Online, considers Prism an addition to the body of evidence that already includes Abu Ghraib and the drone war: The U.S., Augstein writes, is becoming a country of “soft totalitarianism”. The only thing not to be disputable about this statement is the Germans’ expertise when it comes to totalitarianism.

While the U.S. has few laws concerning data privacy, Germany has something unknown to Americans: 17 state data protection supervisors (one national and one for each state), who watch over the compliance of authorities and companies with data privacy laws. Since the German state Hesse introduced the first of these laws in 1970, strict oversight like this has become common in Europe.

Some of the German data supervisors have been regular talking heads in the media for years, bashing U.S. companies like Facebook for their alleged violations of privacy of their customers. When Google photographed German streets for its Street View service, they were pushing the company to give citizens the possibility of opting out. That is why today, tens of thousands of buildings in Germany are blurred on Street View.

Now the data protection supervisors have an even bigger target: the National Security Agency. After the Snowden revelations, they have discontinued giving out new licenses to companies under the so-called Safe Harbor principles, which are meant to guarantee that personal data is only transferred to countries with sufficient data protection, for example when Germans use American companies’ cloud storage space. After the revelations about the Prism program, the supervisors consider user data in the hands of U.S. companies not safe anymore.

Opposition parties have picked the “NSA scandal” – as German media call it – as the big (and, since Chancellor Angela Merkel is leading all polls, only) chance for the opposition to turn around the election. Merkel has been accused of having known more about the extent of the spying before the story broke than she admitted. Since German services are coordinated from the Chancellery, her opponents don’t believe her that she did not know about the American spy efforts.

Yet it is unlikely that the revelations will seriously influence the outcome of the election. This is not only because Merkel has an economy surprisingly immune to the European crisis. It is also because the biggest opposition party, the Social Democrats, has been tainted by its proximity to power. While smaller left-wing parties such as the former communists or the Greens make bold statements, including offering Snowden asylum, Social Democrats have a hard time doing so. One of their heads, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, used to be coordinator for Merkels predecessor Gerhard Schröder. In that position, Steinmeier was responsible for the services and intensified U.S.-German intelligence cooperation in the years after 9/11. He later became Secretary of State under Merkel. Even though that was before Prism started, socialists and conservatives bash him in rare unanimity “as if he’d personally founded the NSA and tapped transatlantic internet cables”, as my colleague Michael König put it for Sueddeutsche.de.

The government’s response to concerns about the spying reads like it was written in the Pentagon: The U.S. said it was only spying on individuals suspected of organized crime or terrorism. And the NSA said it was acting according to U.S. and German law. There is no blanket surveillance of European citizens.

But Germans don’t trust Merkel. A poll found two-thirds of questioned people voicing discontent with her dealing with the affair. Germans hoped for a more forceful reaction, like that from Brazil, another democratic country targeted by the NSA: Brazilian foreign minister Antonio Patriota publicly found strong words standing next to Secretary of State John Kerry last week: "In case these challenges are not solved in a satisfactory way, we run the risk of casting a shadow of distrust on our work.”

In Germany, the government sounds more apologetic than angry.

The U.S. is at least throwing Germany a bone. According to the government in Berlin, the NSA has offered a treaty: No more spying on each other. Georg Mascolo, former editor-in-chief of news Magazine Der Spiegel and now writing for Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, considers this an “historical chance for Angela Merkel”: A treaty, if formulated without loopholes for American spying, would give new value to the German-American alliance.

In any case, we’ll keep on making up fake names on Facebook. Just in case spies are going to keep on doing what spies are supposed to do.

Jannis Brühl is an Arthur F. Burns Fellow at ProPublica. In Germany, he works mostly for Süddeutsche.de in Munich, the online edition of the national daily Süddeutsche Zeitung.

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. InsideClimate News The energy and climate science covering website is technically a startup, but you couldn't tell based on their polished enterprise reporting--published by a team...

While it was good to see the AP's statehouse reporter do a story this week on the release of rates that will be posted on the Montana healthcare insurance exchange, his piece fell short of helping Montanans understand the insurance policies they must choose from, beginning in October. It's too bad, too, since the AP is likely the biggest...

Last week, when entrepreneur Bryan Goldberg announced he'd scored $6.5 million in capital to "completely transform women's publishing," he was eviscerated by women writers and editors, many of whom work for the dozens of existing women-centric sites. And rightfully so--his announcement rendered their work invisible, and to add insult to injury, female media entrepreneurs routinely fail to garner this amount...

AUSTIN, TX -- In the coming months, a federal appellate court in Texas will rule on whether the Justice Department can continue to have a say about how the country's second most populous state handles that most basic right of a citizenry: voting. But the case isn't likely to end there. In the wake of the US Supreme Court's far-reaching...

by Joe Sexton

Emeritus Senior Living, the country’s largest assisted living company, has agreed to pay up to $2.2 million to settle claims that it routinely underpaid workers at dozens of its California facilities.

Hands-on workers at Emeritus facilities – the non-salaried aides and support staff who statewide help care for hundreds of often frail seniors – alleged in a lawsuit that the company had not only shortchanged them in their pay, but also violated state laws concerning mandated meal times and rest periods. Workers were denied overtime and not properly compensated for days during which they underwent training sessions, according to the lawsuit.

A recent investigation of Emeritus by ProPublica and PBS Frontline showed that the company’s top executives saw controlling labor costs as critical to sustaining the publicly traded company’s financial success and maintaining its appeal to investors on Wall Street. The investigation found evidence that the zeal of senior Emeritus officials to cut costs had led to understaffing at many facilities and considerable disgruntlement among remaining staff about their workload and wages.

Emeritus, both in interviews and court papers, has said its close to 500 facilities across the country are adequately staffed and that its workers are properly compensated.

Under the settlement, which needs to be approved next month by a state judge, Emeritus will compensate workers who were employed in its facilities in California from 2007 to 2013. The workers can range from the men and women who bathed and fed the elderly residents to those who administered their medications to those who cleaned the hallways and restrooms of the facilities.

Despite the settlement, Emeritus rejects the accusations made in the lawsuit.

“At Emeritus, we strive to be the employer of choice,” the company said in a statement to ProPublica. “We are competing to hire the very best staff that we can, and we are committed to our community teams. We work to be competitive in terms of total compensation within our industry, and we conduct wage analyses in markets in an effort to stay at or in line with the competition.”

Assisted living, conceived two decades ago to offer older Americans the chance to avoid nursing homes and retain greater degrees of independence and dignity, has become a multibillion-dollar industry, dominated by large chains such as Emeritus. Today, some 750,000 people are housed in assisted living facilities in the U.S., with increasing numbers of them suffering from dementia and other serious medical issues.

Experts in the assisted living industry say the low wages paid to workers by companies like Emeritus have produced a workforce that often is poorly trained and beset by poor morale. The lawsuit, initially brought by two caregivers at a single California facility, alleged that the company customarily cheated its modestly paid workforce of what it was legally owed. The lawsuit was granted class-action status, and the proposed compensation is available now to hundreds of workers at Emeritus’s more than 50 facilities in California.

“When it comes to the direct caregivers, you need to hire people who are dedicated to their work,” said Sally Clark Stearns, a professor of health policy at the University of North Carolina Gillings School of Global Public Health. “To do that, you need to pay people sufficient wages to have a stable workforce.”

J. Kevin Eckert and Erin Roth, researchers from the Center for Aging Studies at the University of Maryland who have studied the assisted living industry for more than a decade, noted that the quality of care delivered by large assisted living companies is intimately tied to how well the company pays its workers.

“I am always amazed by the commitment of direct care workers,” Eckert said. “But many of the problems in assisted living stem from the fact these workers earn minimum wage.”

“Many direct care workers haven’t graduated high school, are often immigrants, and earn roughly $20,000 a year,” Eckert added. “Many are single parents that have complicated lives. And they’re often leaving one job because they can earn fifty cents more somewhere else. That’s very disruptive. This is not the way to provide care in one of the fastest growing industries in the country.”

by Theodoric Meyer

Mid-August marks the start of peak hurricane season, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has warned that this year’s is likely to be worse than usual, with a forecast of 13 to 19 named storms. We’ve round up some of the best reporting on hurricanes and what happens after they’re over — from  inept planning to police abuses to waste and misspending during the recovery.

After the Flood, This American Life, September 2005

The week after Katrina struck New Orleans, This American Life devoted its show to giving “people who were in the storm more time than daily news shows could give, to tell their stories and talk about what happened.”

One of those people was Denise Moore, who took shelter at the New Orleans Convention Center after the levees failed. “What they kept doing the whole time was tell us to line up for the buses that never came” she told Ira Glass. “It was like they were doing drills every four hours. You all have to line up for the bus. And if you bum rush the bus, they're just going to take off without you, and nobody is going to get to go anywhere. You have to line up. You have to be in a straight line. We're talking about old people in wheelchairs and women with babies in lines, waiting for buses that you know God damn well aren't coming, like they were playing with us.”

The Deadly Choices at Memorial, ProPublica and the New York Times Magazine, August 2009

ProPublica reporter Sheri Fink spent two and a half years reconstructing what happened at New Orleans’ Memorial Medical Center during Hurricane Katrina. She found that the exhausted, overwhelmed doctors intentionally injected a number of patients with lethal doses of morphine and the sedative midazolam during the chaotic evacuation of the hospital. 

From Blue Tarps to Debris Removal, Layers of Contractors Drive Up the Cost of Recovery, Critics Say, The Times-Picayune, December 2005

The federal contractors hired using the $60 billion Congress earmarked for the Katrina recovery hired subcontractors, who hired sub-subcontractors — a process that sometimes produced sub-sub-sub-sub-subcontractors, or “fifth-tier subs,” and helped to drive up the cost of recovery. “In other words,” The Times-Picayune reported, “the guy spinning a Bobcat choked with tree limbs on a residential street may be earning as little as $1 per cubic yard of debris, although the prime contractor may be billing 20 times that amount for the service.”

After Katrina, New Orleans Cops Were Told They Could Shoot Looters, ProPublica, Frontline and the New Orleans Times-Picayune, August 2010

One commander told New Orleans police officers they had the “authority under martial law to shoot looters” in the days after Katrina, according to a videotape of his remarks. Two New Orleans cops said that the department’s second-in-command at the time, gave a similar order, even though police had no such authority under the law.

The story was part of a series on cop shootings after Katrina. Another story in the series looked at the case of Henry Glover, whose remains were found inside a burned-out car in the days after Katrina. Two witnesses said police had refused to help Glover after he had been shot and they drove him to a police command post. A cop later drove off with his body still in the car. After the stories, three officers were charged and convicted in connection with Glover’s death. An appeals court later overturned two of the convictions.  

Behind a Call That Kept Nursing Home Patients in Storm’s Path, The New York Times, December 2012

The day before Hurricane Sandy struck, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg ordered a mandatory evacuation of New York City’s low-lying neighborhoods. But the city recommended that residents of nursing and adult homes in the same areas ride out the storm. The decision led to difficult evacuations through sand and debris after the storm, which “severely flooded” least 29 such facilities in Queens and Brooklyn.

How New Jersey Transit Failed Sandy’s Test, WNYC and The Record, May 2013

Hurricane Sandy inundated 19 of the 8,000 rail cars operated by New York’s Metropolitan Transit Authority. It engulfed hundreds of New Jersey Transit cars, more than a quarter of the fleet, thanks to the decision in yards that flooded. An investigation by WNYC and the New Jersey Bergen Record found that NJ Transit had used maps built inaccurate numbers that showed the yards wouldn’t flood.

Suffering on Long Island As Power Agency Shows Its Flaws, The New York Times, November 2012

Two weeks after Sandy hit, more than 10,000 Long Island Power Authority customers still didn’t have power. A Times investigation found that the government-run authority had “repeatedly failed to plan for extreme weather” and had fallen behind on trimming tree limbs near power lines. At the same time, the authority had become “a rich source” of high-paid patronage jobs for politicians’ friends and relatives.

Miami-Dade Cleans Up on FEMA Aid, The Sun Sentinel, November 2004

The Federal Emergency Management Agency sent $28 million worth of relief to Miami-Dade County in Florida after Hurricane Frances hit in 2004, even though the brunt of the storm struck 100 miles north of the county. The damage in Miami-Dade was limited to “a few fallen and power lines.” But FEMA shelled out for new cars, lawn mowers, thousands of appliances and even a funeral in Miami-Dade, even though no one in the county died in the storm. The story is part of a Sun Sentinel series investigating FEMA.

Weak Insurers Put Millions of Floridians at Risk, The Sarasota Herald-Tribune, February 2010

Big insurance companies like State Farm and Allstate fled the Florida property insurance market after Katrina hammered the Gulf Coast in 2005. A Herald-Tribune investigation found that millions of Floridians had turned to tiny insurance companies that had taken their place, which had nowhere near enough money to cover the billions of dollars in property they insured. Lawmakers and regulators had “ignored warnings and encouraged private companies to stretch their limited cash further.”

Want more hurricane coverage? Check out our ongoing series on FEMA and the challenge of rebuilding after storms as the climate changes.

There's a riot going on in the streets of Foodieville, as some prominent food writers do battle over the role of "Big Food" in the American diet, and it seems to have no end in sight. This is unproductive--albeit entertaining--behavior that is obscuring some thoughtful reporting about practical solutions our nation's problem with healthy eating. It all started in...

After a two-year holding pattern following the gradual retirement of Jim Lehrer from on-air duties, PBS NewsHour is entering a transformative period. On September 7, the program will expand to seven days a week, debuting a weekend edition of the NewsHour and ending years of frequent questions from viewers, along with the service's own ombudsman, about the lack of scheduled...

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. Nautilus: Like Radiolab, Nautilus picks one big theme and dives, running deep and long and plucking sometimes discordant notes that come together into one symphonic whole. Matter: Not "quite a website...not...

The Wall Street Journal posts a very interesting blog item about how Amazon is showing signs that it's losing its most important competitive advantage: lower prices. Alas, it oversells what it's got. After years of successfully avoiding having to collect sales taxes drawing to a close—far too late—Amazon is losing the unfair price advantage it's had over bricks and mortar...

The external review into how Bloomberg News staffers used and misused confidential client data available on Bloomberg LP terminals in their reporting turned up few if any surprises and effectively puts the mini-scandal to bed. If anything, the belt-and-suspenders review—conducted by a flying squadron of lawyers and consultants, along with a journalistic wiseperson or two—will only reaffirm Bloomberg's standing as...

We know, we know. Enough already. But as baroquely banal as Alex Rodriguez’s saga with performance enhancing drugs has become, the subject of sports and drugs is a serious and, it seems, eternal issue.

We asked David Epstein – new ProPublican, acclaimed author of “The Sports Gene” and expert on matters of science and sports – to list some memorable reads on the issue of performance enhancing drug:

What You Don't Know Might Kill You, Sports Illustrated, May 2009
This is my favorite story on supplements that I was involved with. (And it was introduced into the congressional record.) 

I Couldn’t Be More Positive, Outside, May 2011
A great story in which a journalist and amateur cyclist use drugs for a year.


The Fastest Man in the Prison Yard, ESPN, September 2009
I think this is about as interesting as athlete confessions get.


The Godfather, Sports Illustrated, March 2008
This was about a guy who sabotaged a study and made the medical community say that steroids don't work.


In Chase for Wins, a Runner Cheats, New York Times, October 2012
I like this one, just in terms of helping convince people that this is for lower level athletes too.

Who Knew, ESPN Magazine, November 2005
An ambitious look at the history of steroids in baseball.

“The Secret Race” and “Game of Shadows”
Both these books were both game changers. Here’s an excerpt from Game of Shadows.

I was relieved to see this article from the Associated Press yesterday, which was carried in several outlets: "Russian Runners Say Kiss Was Not a Protest of Anti-Gay Laws." Why? Two reasons. First, the odd, breathless speculation over whether a Getty photo of two athletes kissing on the podium at the world championships in Moscow was a protest or not...

Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger's bombshell column Monday night was one of the biggest pieces of media news in recent years. But as the HuffPost's Michael Calderone points out, the paper stuffed it on page 28 with just a teaser on page one. It's impossible to criticize Rusbridger, though, who has become the premiere editor of his generation with the paper's...