Media

The hosannas for Donald Graham got a bit out of hand in the wake of his sale of the Washington Post to Jeff Bezos. I'm thinking specifically of this open letter in the Post itself, from the guy who wrote Graham's advance obit. Henry Blodget is on to something here in writing about an investor (whom Valleywag writes is "probably"...

SANTA BARBARA, CA -- Sometimes, a headline pretty much tells the whole, journalistically horrifying story. Late in July, Las Vegas CBS affiliate KLAS TV broadcast a short video report on back-to-school immunizations; the accompanying web article sported this headline, "Doctors Debate Need for Child Vaccinations." Well, no, they don't, actually. The medical consensus in support of a standard series of...

In recent weeks, we talked about idioms that are misheard, and thus miswritten. Now, we'll discuss some idioms that say the opposite of what they mean and whether they're "acceptable" English. As we mentioned some time ago, the title of Bill Walsh's new book, Yes I Could Care Less, was scolded by LinkedIn for bad grammar. If you cancare less,...

An internal review found serious problems with an award-winning NPR investigation. This past Friday, NPR Ombudsman Edward Schumacher-Matos released an 80-page report reviewing an October 2011 Peabody-winning investigation into the South Dakota foster care system's treatment of Native American children. The ombudsman's review concluded that the investigation as aired violated NPR's Code of Ethics. NPR management has vehemently disagreed with...

by Cora Currier

There have been nine drone strikes reported in Yemen in the past two weeks – an uptick apparently connected to the Al Qaeda threat that shut down U.S. embassies across the Middle East and Africa. As many as six civilian deaths have also been reported.

President Obama has promised increased transparency around drones, but when asked about the strikes on Friday, Obama wouldn’t even confirm U.S. involvement.

“I will not have a discussion about operational issues,” he said.

The military is also following that line, refusing to release details about what happens when civilians are harmed in these strikes, including if and how families of innocent victims are compensated.

In response to a Freedom of Information Act request, U.S. Central Command told ProPublica it has 33 pages somehow related to condolence payments in Yemen – but it won’t release any of them, or detail what they are.

The military’s letter rejecting our FOIA cites a series of reasons, including classified national security information. (Here’s the letter.)

There’s no way to know what the military is withholding. A Pentagon spokesman told us they haven’t actually made condolence payments in Yemen. But CIA director John Brennan said during his confirmation process in February that the U.S. does offer condolence payments to the families of civilians killed in U.S. strikes. (Both the military and CIA fly drones over Yemen.)    

In May, the White House released new guidelines for targeted killing, saying that there must be a “near certainty that non-combatants will not be injured or killed.” But the administration has said little about how civilian deaths are assessed or handled when they do occur. It has refused to address the U.S. role in almost any particular death – including that of a 10-year-old boy, killed a few weeks after Obama’s promise of increased transparency.

Outside reporting on drone strike deaths is spotty and often conflicted. On Sunday, a Yemeni activist and journalist named three civilians who had been injured, “just hanging arnd n thir neighborhood.” Another recent strike killed up to five “militants,” according to Reuters and other news agencies. But Yemenis reported on Twitter that a child was also killed. (The White House declined to comment to ProPublica on the recent strikes or on condolence payments.)

In Afghanistan, the U.S. has long given out condolence payments, which military leaders have come to see as a key part of the battle for hearts and minds. What might seem like a callous exercise – assigning a dollar amount to a human life – is also embraced by many humanitarian groups. The Center for Civilians in Conflict, for example, sees it as a way to help families financially and as “a gesture of respect.” In fiscal year 2012, condolence payments in Afghanistan totaled nearly a million dollars.

It’s likely harder to do that in the drone war. Military and intelligence leaders have expressed concern about “blowback” from local populations resentful of the strikes. But the U.S. has no visible troops on the ground in countries like Yemen or Pakistan, and almost never acknowledges specific strikes.

Despite the recent surge, overall there have been far fewer drone strikes and civilian deaths alleged in 2013 than in previous years.

 

For more on the U.S.’ shadowy drone war, read our latest story, “Who Are We at War With? That’s Classified,” our coverage of the controversial practice of “signature strikes”, and our chat with national security reporters on the challenges of covering a remote and secret war.

Over the weekend, Brendan Nyhan appeared on MSNBC's UP With Steve Kornacki to discuss his recent United States Project piece, "The Scandal Attention Cycle. How the media lost interest in IRS targeting, even as new facts emerged." "The media doesn't want to run a headline saying, 'Not as Much News Here as We Thought'," said Nyhan. "So instead they simply...

The headline of the moment is that US authorities are poised to arrest two JP Morgan officials for allegedly covering up losses in the London Whale trading debacle of last year. Whether this signals a newfound aggressiveness in white-collar prosecution at the federal level remains to be seen. Here's hoping. But beneath the surface, evidence has been quietly piling up...

How many doctors are really refusing to treat Medicare patients? It's a simple enough question. But it's also one of many politically charged questions in healthcare, and politics makes for elusive answers. If you're a doctor or a physicians' trade group angling for higher reimbursements from Medicare, you make the case that a lot of doctors are leaving because they...

This month, CJR presents "Required skimming," a daily miniguide to our staffers' beats and obsessions. If we overlooked your favorite too cool for school food mag, please tell us in the comments. --Michael Wahid Hanna: A senior fellow at the Century Foundation, Hanna has emerged as a go-to authority on the ongoing political crisis in Egypt, giving thoughtful, informative opinions...

Score one for the watchdogs at Bloomberg News, whose reporting helped force the Obama administration to admit that it touted wildly inflated mortgage-fraud prosecution numbers a month before the election. Phil Mattingly and Tom Schoenberg noticed right away that something was amiss with Eric Holder's announcement, filing this story two days after the AG said a yearlong sweep had resulted...

On Tuesday, the American Meteorological Society released its annual "State of the Climate" report, a hefty, 258-page document chronicling changes in global warming data. Compiled by members of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, along with 384 scientists from 52 countries, the report is used to set and influence domestic climate policy and distributes statistics that form the baseline for...

Audit Chief Dean Starkman and PolitiFact founder Bill Adair, now a professor at Duke, talk to Minnesota Public Radio about the bombshell media news of the year: The Grahams' sale of the Washington Post to Amazon's Jeff Bezos. Have a listen:

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: Donald Graham's choice -- On Monday afternoon, he sacrificed his family's ownership in the hopes of saving the thing itself Why the sale of the Washington...

A little more than a month ago, The New York Times came forth with a story describing how a dangerous disease called valley fever is infecting thousands of people throughout the Southwest, especially in California and Arizona. It's an airborne fungal disease--"a silent epidemic," the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) calls it--and it has the potential to...

The New York Times's disturbing story on Newark Mayor Cory Booker's ties with Silicon Valley is what 21st century corruption looks like. Booker, the leading Democratic candidate for an open New Jersey Senate seat, has been moonlighting as chairman of yet another social video startup thing—one with the backing of plutocrat patrons like Google Chairman Eric Schmidt, Oprah, and Reid...

Since Wednesday, Patch employees have been waiting for news of layoffs rumored to come coupled with the announcement of a strategy shift at at the massive hyperlocal. In a Friday morning conference call, AOL CEO Tim Armstrong delayed the layoff announcements, instead announcing a change in strategy to focus only on the best performing Patch sites. "If it doesn't sink...

by Blair Hickman and Christie Thompson

In 1994, Bridget O’Connor began an internship at Rockland Psychiatric Center, where one of the doctors allegedly began to refer to her as Miss Sexual Harassment, told her that she should participate in an orgy, and suggested that she remove her clothing before meeting with him. Other women in the office made similar claims.

Yet when O’Connor filed a lawsuit, her sexual harassment claims were dismissed because she was an unpaid intern. A federal appeals court affirmed the decision to throw out the claim.

Unpaid interns miss out on wages and employment benefits, but they can also find themselves in “legal limbo” when it comes to civil rights, according to law professor and intern labor rights advocate David Yamada. The O’Connor decision (the leading ruling on the matter, according to Yamada) held that because they don’t get a paycheck, unpaid interns are not “employees” under the Civil Rights Act -- and thus, they’re not protected.

Federal policies echo court rulings. The laws enforced by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, including the Civil Rights Act, don’t cover interns unless they receive “significant remuneration,” according to commission spokesperson Joseph Olivares.

“At least with respect to the federal law that we enforce, an unpaid intern would not be legally protected by our laws prohibiting sexual harassment,” Olivares said in an email to ProPublica.

It’s unclear how many interns are sexually harassed at work. The commission doesn’t keep those statistics, according to Olivares. And as the Chicago Tribune detailed in 2011, interns often don’t know where to turn when faced with harassment or can fear retaliation from bosses they look to for future jobs or recommendations.

“You can understand perhaps why there haven’t been more cases,” said Yamada. “If you’re a young student, and have been trying to get a career off the ground, the bind that puts someone in is significant, because there’s retaliation.”

Olivares noted that while federal laws don’t protect unpaid interns, company policies and state or local laws could sometimes broaden workplace protections.

In June, Oregon passed a law expanding discrimination and harassment protections to interns, whether they are paid or not. According to Charlie Burr, spokespersonfor the state’s Bureau of Labor and Industries, Oregon is the first state to pass such protections.

“Those principles of protecting people in the workplace have been in place for a long time, but they’ve never applied to interns,” said Oregon Labor Commissioner Brad Avakian. “It really left them with few options.”

Oregon’s law protects interns from sexual harassment and discrimination based on race, religion, gender, disability, and sexual orientation and covers wrongful termination tied to discrimination — but it doesn’t create an employment relationship or impact wages, an issue the state was careful to avoid, according to Avakian.

The idea for the law came from Carole Delogu, a former unpaid intern in the state’s Bureau of Labor and Industries, after she read an article in the Public Interest Law Journal on the workplace protections not afforded to interns.

“I was in disbelief,” Delogu said, of her reaction to the loophole. “Interns are in a fragile place, they want to get their foot in the door, so they don’t complain.”

So Delogu brought her concerns to the Labor bureau, and helped draft a proposal to close the gap in protections. Under the new law, Delogu hopes “more people will be able to stand up for their rights.”

D.C. has made similar strides to protect interns. Council member Mary Cheh lobbied successfully to extend the D.C. Human Rights Act protections against sexual harassment to interns after hearing the story of one intern’s sexual harassment claims against her employer, a massage and body therapy center in Friendship Heights. The intern’s case was dismissed because she was unpaid.

Yet as Maurice Pianko, attorney and founder of Intern Justice, points out: if for-profit employers paid their interns when they should (and usually they should be paid), protection from discrimination and sexual harassment would automatically apply.

“It’s a surprise to me to see that there are still companies not paying their employees,” Pianko said. “If any general counsel wants to find out the law they can, and honestly I don’t know what they’re thinking.” 

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When it comes to factchecking, sooner or later, everyone's a critic. And those criticisms come mainly in two flavors. One line of attack holds that the factcheckers at PolitiFact, FactCheck.org, and their sister sites are slaves to semantics, issuing narrow technical rulings that ignore some more fundamental truth. After all, politicians know how to deceive us with carefully worded cant....

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. --The Walrus: The Canadian answer to such high-end American magazines as The New Yorker and Harper's, The Walrus combines a commitment to longform feature journalism with a vaguely irreverent tone reminiscent...

Twenty-one years ago, in 1992, former Washington Post managing editor Robert Kaiser typed out a famously prescient memo describing his conclusions after attending an Apple-organized conference on the future of "multimedia." Kaiser urged the Post to be at the forefront of the oncoming digital revolution. And at Washingtonpost.com, where I worked from 1997 to 2003, we made some noble efforts....