CJR Daily

The Republicans in Congress are holding the debt ceiling hostage—yet again—with potentially catastrophic consequences: "Hand over the Obamacare or the full faith and credit of the United States gets it!" And if the full faith and credit of the United States gets it, we all get it. What makes all this even more disturbing is that a good number of...

A few years ago, a student journalist wrote a profile for a class that recalled how she found her calling: "Her love for photojournalism came from spending evenings in a dark room with her father." The student could not understand why the professor doubled over with laughter. "I think you meant darkroom, not dark room," the prof said. "What's the...

FAIRWAY, KS -- In the five days leading up to the government shutdown on Oct. 1, Rep. Tim Huelskamp of Kansas was a busy man. He helped lead the charge of Tea Party Republicans pushing House leadership to refuse to fund the government unless Obamacare was defunded or delayed--making a cameo on the Senate floor to plot strategy with Republicans...

We write a lot about Wall Street corruption here at The Audit. But if you ask me, Wall Street's got nothing on Big Medicine, where the stakes are even bigger. In just the last four years, four major pharmaceutical companies have reached billion-dollar settlements for criminal activities. Check out this rap sheet of kickbacks, illegal marketing, and fraud by drug...

With the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) already gone, and the National Association of Hispanic Journalists (NAHJ) halfway out the door, David Steinberg has his work cut out for him as the new president of UNITY: Journalists for Diversity. Not only does he need to figure out how to repair relationships with NABJ and NAHJ, Steinberg also will need...

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: If it happened there ... the government shutdown -- American events described using the tropes and tone normally employed by the American media to describe events...

It's been overshadowed a little bit by the shutdown in Washington, but this week marked the rollout--at long last--of the Affordable Care Act, and with it came a wave of media attention. Over the next few weeks as implementation moves along, the early glitches (hopefully) get sorted out, and people sign up for insurance, we'll pass along our take on...

AUSTIN, TX -- Last week on the sprawling, sunny campus of the University of Texas at Austin, some of the most established and up-and-coming media leaders in this state came together at an event organized by CJR and the UT School of Journalism to assess the state of accountability reporting--and where it can go from here. What ensued was a...

Media Matters catches Fox Business's Stuart Varney in a viler-than-usual moment calling in to a radio show (emphasis mine): HOWELL: Do you think that federal workers, when this ends, are deserving of their back pay or not? VARNEY: That is a loaded question isn't it? You want my opinion? This is President Obama's shutdown. He is responsible for shutting this...

Earlier this year, photographer Sara Lewkowicz caught a moment of domestic violence on camera. Lewkowicz had been working the tedious documentary slog, spending long days and nights with a couple named Maggie and Shane, hoping to cull from their daily lives images that would tell a story about returning veteransrecidivism. Instead, Lewkowicz ended up with images of abuse. Six of...

This Hank Greenberg column in the Journal on Tuesday is more shameless than your average WSJ op-ed. And that's saying something. Greenberg, whose too-big-to-fail company played a critical role—perhaps the critical role—in goosing the housing bubble by acting as a sort of dump for Wall Street's mortgage-securities risk, comes to the defense of JPMorgan Chase's Jamie Dimon, who's been getting...

Spend extended time reading the science press, and it's easy to think that science is a one-note story about the amazing discoveries that happen in test tubes and laboratories. In reality, there's a plethora of under-covered science angles, most notably the politics of research funding and science policy. That's why Stéphane Horel and Brian Bienkowski deserve a laurel for an...

MIAMI, FL -- When Gov. Rick Scott announced last week he was pulling Florida out of a multi-state consortium working to create tests that will assess students' mastery of the new Common Core curriculum standards beginning next school year, the news appropriately drew wide coverage from the state's press corps. Journalists here sketched out in broad terms what the news...

You know it's October because of the pink. Breast Cancer Awareness Month has become inescapable, making the rare leap from a fake observance to a cultural moment. People are diagnosed with breast cancer every day of the year, but October is when we read their inspiring survival stories in women's magazines. "Awareness months" are tailor-made for the sort of reporting...

The New York Times's Peter Eavis has another excellent story for the paper's often-Wall Street-friendly DealBook on JPMorgan Chase and its legal woes. Eavis methodically dispenses with several arguments about why it's supposedly unfair for JPMorgan to pay for the crimes of its acquisitions, specifically for Washington Mutual and Bear Stearns: But JPMorgan may not be the martyr some think...

On Tuesday, the Affordable Care Act made its official debut, adding another patch to America's patchwork quilt of health insurance. This fix retains the system of private health insurance and private delivery of care, but aims to brings another 24 or 25 million people under the insurance cover. They are people who, for the most part, did not have insurance...

In anticipation of Congress' next big fight over copyright, legal academics are working to gather data and learn how copyright actually works in the real world. But lawyers aren't the only academics who have been using empirical techniques to gather information on the people who work within--and outside of--copyright law in its current form. Scholars of business, anthropology, and literature...

In May 2009, Dallas Morning News publisher Jim Moroney told the Senate that a paywall didn't make sense for his newspaper unless everybody else did one too: if The Dallas Morning News today put up a paywall over its content, people would go to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. By January 2011, Moroney was saying this as the News launched a...

If the digital revolution has done nothing else, it has exposed the extent to which American newspapers have relied on their quasi-monopolistic control over local advertising markets to fund news operations. CW Anderson, Emily Bell, and Clay Shirky, in their valuable report last year, called it a "subsidy," and that's a provocative way to put it. Here are the report's...

The fact that newspapers are suffering in the digital age is old news. Media watchers have been discussing how to salvage them for years, casting the internet as both the source of newsprint's declining revenues and as its potential savior. But Chris Powell, the managing editor of the Manchester, CT-based Journal Inquirer, apparently hasn't been paying attention to the changes...