Tucker Carlson’s interview with Russian dictator Vladimir Putin in early February has generated controversy for, among other things, violating the SPJ code of ethics (‘Tell the truth and report it’). Here are some takes on the interview from three very different perspectives — Jon Stewart, Glen Greenwald and Ian Bremmer:
First, Jon Stewart, who is disgusted by Carlson:
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On the 40th anniversary of the Apple Super Bowl ad for the first Macintosh computer, we remember the people who created the ad as well as a time when hackers hoped to liberate computing.
It is no small historical irony that today, the most restrictive and least liberated of the big tech companies is Apple.
When the ad first aired — once, at the Super Bowl on Jan 22, 1984 — it was such a strong and unusual claim that it was replayed over and over on network television. The claim was that this computer represented a vision of a free internet. That is, free as in “free markets” and “free speech” — freedom from censorship and dark cycle forced purchases. Computing that could afford to be ethical.
Most of all it meant freedom from IBM, which at the time had a strict corporate culture and a record of ethics-free service to government — even the government of Germany in the 1930s.
Apple was supposed to be above all that, and these days, historians often lead us to believe that it was. The usual celebrations of Apple Corp., and Steve Jobs gloss over the wretched stuff — the Foxconn suicides, the the dictatorial tantrums, his astonishingly selfish family life.
However, it was the open source liberated computing movement with Ted Nelson, Richard Stallman, Bill Joy and others who really changed computing. The Unix operating system and the Apache web server, among many others, are fundamental to the way networks operate today. Without them, computer users would be paying much more for the privilege of getting online, and the prospect of an open World Wide Web would have been foreclosed.
Most of the articles about the Apple 1984 ad focus on the ad’s style, not its message of liberation.
A Feb. 9, 2024 NY Times article on the anniversary of the ad features interviews with director Ridley Scott; John Sculley, Apple; Steve Hayden, a copy writer; Fred Goldberg, the Apple account manager; and Anya Rajah, the actor who famously threw the sledgehammer. (Little known fact: The hammer was paper mache).
Other videos about the ad include:
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Posted in Change & Technology, Lies & damned lies, Videos
First cover, Aug. 16, 1954. (Wikipedia)
By Bill Kovarik
Sports Illustrated — once the beloved icon of sports news and photography — has been sidelined for financial irregularities and technical fouls. It probably won’t be back.
The fouls involved articles scraped up through artificial intelligence bots – an ethical lapse which came to light in November, 2023. Worse, the magazine tried to cover it up with AI portraits of the supposed authors. The ruse was quickly spotted and the editor was fired.
As advertisers began pulling out, the remaining editors and management faced increasing financial trouble and then, on Jan. 5, 2024, defaulted on regular quarterly payment to its owners, Authentic Brands Group. Two weeks later, ABG terminated the licensing agreement and laid off most of the reporting staff.
So, let’s pause for a moment of silent reflection, in recognition that another great institution is passing us by, headed for the intellectual property bone yards, where its icons will be recycled to brand products like designer swimsuits and tennis shoes.
Sports Illustrated was founded in 1954 by Henry Luce of the Time-Life group to compete with two of the major sports magazines of the time — Sport (founded 1946) and the venerable Sporting News (founded 1886). Back then, people thought Luce was crazy to invest in a “jockstrap” magazine, but his timing was good.
Illustrated magazines were filling the consumer demand for high quality visual experiences while the dominant media — radio and early television — offered audiences only low visual definition. Sports Illustrated also presented better quality journalism and photography than was possible in daily newspapers at the time, and Luce managed to keep all his magazines a step ahead of the competition.
In the 1950s and 60s — a time when politics was America’s most dangerous occupation — Sports Illustrated occupied center field by raising the tone of sports news. Along with sports that were already well covered, like boxing and baseball, Sports Illustrated opened tennis, golf, football and basketball to greater public participation.
Some of its editorial innovations are still well known, such as the athlete of the year and the annual swimsuit issue. Making the cover of Sports Illustrated was, for an athlete, a lot like a Nobel Prize for a scientist.
However, by the end of the twentieth century, the business of magazine and newspaper publishing fractured under competitive pressures from cable, streaming and internet publications. Advertising and circulation declined, and so did Sports Illustrated, despite valiant attempts to save it.
The magazine was sold during the Time-Warner breakup in 2018 and, after changing hands, was picked up by Authentic Brands Group, which specializes in
Experience history with COMS 300 in Fall 2023. (Click thru image for details.)
Learn to use an 18th century goose quill on parchment; set type by hand; send & receive morse code; use cryptographic techniques; and experience the history of newspapers, photography, radio, cinema, TV and computers.
Sign up for COMS 300, #16209, T-Th 11-12:15, during add-drop this fall.
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Wayzgoose falls on August 24th each year, so let’s make the most of it.
What’s Wayzgoose? You may well ask.
It’s the traditional holiday for printers, typesetters, bookbinders, copy editors, journalists and all the ink stained wretches who wear garters on their sleeves and sit below the salt.
The centuries-old event has largely been lost in the 21st century, but it was still very much alive a generation or two ago, especially among printing unions in the US and UK.
Wendell Berry has written extensively about farming as agriculture, with the accent on culture. Similarly, printing was a living culture at the heart of European and American society, and worth remembering, if only because its echoes can still be heard, faintly, in modern times, especially around Aug. 24.
The holiday has its origins in the feast day for St. Bartholomew, the patron saint of scribes and, later, of printers and writers.
The odd name for the holiday, Wayzgoose, refers to the centerpiece of this holiday meal: a goose that had been fattened on stubble (or wayz) from a harvested field of grain.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the Wayzgoose was
An entertainment given by a master-printer to his workmen ‘about Bartholomew-tide’ (24 August), marking the beginning of the season of working by candle-light. In later use, an annual festivity held in summer by the employees of a printing establishment, consisting of a dinner and (usually) an excursion into the country.
The celebration would be held at the master printer’s home, or in later centuries, as part of an excursion into the country.
The Wayzgoose was often the occasion for the introduction of new apprentices, the promotion of older apprentices to journeymen, and speeches about the virtues of the profession.
A speech by the company’s owner or master printer might include a reminder that printers had much in common with the monks who once laboriously copied books by hand.
He (or not infrequently, she) might tell them that the printing company was still called a chapel, the foreman
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An exhibit at the Missouri Historical Society reminds us that women have had an important but often overlooked place in media history. This photo from the exhibit shows the staff of the Miami Herald’s women’s pages in the 1950s.
The photo features many women who made important contributions to journalism. Dorothy Jurney is in the immediate foreground. Roberta Applegate is seated facing the camera against the far wall with her arm on her typewriter. Marie Anderson is at the center of the photograph seated at her desk with a pencil in her hand. Eleanor Ratelle is standing next to the filing cabinet in the back. [Jurney, Dorothy Misener (1909-2002), Papers, 1920-1992 (C3904)]
This is only the latest in a global effort to ensure more accurate and equal representation of women in all professions and walks of life.
Other articles and historical resources about women in journalism include:
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Posted in Features
Ida B. Wells
February is traditionally black history month, and it’s time to recall that one of the most significant moments in the history of the American press involves the long, ongoing struggle for civil rights in the Black press and the resistance from the White / mainstream press against civil rights, which only gradually changed in the post World War II era.
There are two stories. Part I is the story of the African American / Black press — the mainstay of the long movement for equality. Part II is the story of the White / mainstream press reluctantly awakening to its responsibilities.
The Black press “was the signal corps,” wrote Margot Lee Shetterly, author of Hidden Figures, “giving the watchword so that the negro community moved forward in synch with America.”
Read more: “Civil Rights and the Press” here, at Revolutions in Communication.
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Posted in Features, Resistance to injustice
Peace on Earth, 1939 — Hugh Harman’s animated short was a break from the light-hearted tradition of animation in the 1930s. The MGM cartoon was a serious plea for peace just as World War II was starting. It depicted never-ending wars and the last people on earth killing each other, followed by animals rebuilding society using the helmets of the soldiers.
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“Permit me a final word, if you would,” said Jim Gardner, retiring Philadelphia ABC affiliate news anchor, in his final address to the audience Dec. 21, 2022.
“The American free press has been under attack, not by forces from other countries, but from elements embedded in our own society, and even our own government. It worries me deeply.”
Gardner went on to quote Thomas Jefferson’s words to John Jay in 1786, “Our liberty can not be guarded but by the freedom of the press, nor that be limited without danger of losing it.”
“We are not the enemy of the people. Serving the people, you the people of the tri-state area, with responsible and unbiased journalism. This is our mission now and in the future. And if we falter, you damn well better let us know, for your benefit and for ours.”
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By Kristi Hines, Sept. 2, 2022
SEARCH ENGINE JOURNAL
Randy Suess and Ward Christensen introduced the Computerized Hobbyists Bulletin Board System in 1978.
While initially designed to help the inventors network with fellow members of a computer club in Chicago and generate content for their club’s newsletter, it eventually grew to support 300-600 users.
CBBS still exists today as a forum with posts dating back to 2000.
As modems increased speed, bulletin board systems became more popular with computer users. Using the telnet BBS Guide, you can travel back in time and see over 1,000 bulletin board systems.
— MORE —
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A new license plate could be added this summer to the more than 250 options Virginians can choose from if the House of Delegates passes and the governor signs a bill to introduce the design commemorating a newspaper founded by emancipated men.
The bill to create a license plate in honor of the Richmond Planet passed the Senate unanimously last week. Sen. Joe Morrissey, D-Richmond, introduced the bill on Jan. 21 with Sen. Jennifer McClellan, D-Richmond, as a cosponsor. However, the effort to increase awareness of the history of the pioneering Black newspaper started last year when Tappahannock native Reginald Carter started gathering the 450 preorders needed to kickstart the process before the General Assembly’s session began.
“It was definitely a sigh of relief,” Carter said of his reaction to the bill passing the Senate. “You know, sad that we’re not done, but this is a major step in the process that has been achieved.”
The Richmond Planet caught Carter’s attention while he conducted research with a Tappahanock genealogy society to tell the story of a lynching that took place in the area on March 23, 1896. That’s when he encountered articles by John Mitchell Jr., the editor and publisher of the newspaper who had been born into slavery and became an advocate for civil rights in Richmond and elsewhere in Virginia. Continue reading
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The Conversation asked three experts on social media, technology policy and global business to offer one specific action the government could take about Meta’s Facebook service.
LET USERS CONTROL THEIR DATA
Anjana Susarla, Professor of Information Systems, Michigan State University
Social media sites like Facebook are designed for constant interaction to engage users’ attention. To rein in Facebook, lawmakers must first understand the harm that results from algorithmic manipulation on these platforms. One thing Congress could do is make sure Facebook gives users more control over what data the company collects about them and why.
Most people who use Facebook are unaware of how algorithmic recommendations affect their experience of the platform and thereby the information they engage with. For example, political campaigns have reportedly tried to manipulate engagement to get more traction on Facebook.
A key aspect of providing such transparency is giving users greater access to and control over their data, similar to what’s proposed in California’s Consumer Privacy Act. This would allow users to see what personal data Facebook collects about them and how the company uses it. Many people don’t realize that Meta has the ability to make inferences about their political preferences and attitudes toward society.
A related issue is data portability tools and rights that allow users to take the data, including photos and videos, that they shared on Facebook to other social media services. Continue reading
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The 2021 Pulitzer Prize for commentary and editorial writing, won by Richmond Times Dispatch columnist Michael Paul Williams, begins by noting that there were objections to the massive statues of Robert E Lee and other Confederate heroes erected in the 1890s in the former capitol of the Confederacy.
Williams wrote:
The original opponent of the Robert E. Lee statue issued a stern prophesy after the monument was erected in 1890. John Mitchell Jr. — newspaper editor, politician, banker and civil rights activist — predicted that the monument “will ultimately result in handing down to generations unborn a legacy of treason and blood.”
John Mitchell, Jr., was editor of the Richmond Planet from 1884 – 1925. A resident of Richmond, Va.’s Jackson Ward area, Mitchell was born into slavery in 1863, but his family was freed when Union troops liberated the city in April 1865.
Beginning in December, 1884, Mitchell started reporting on injustice and lynchings. For example, he reported on a lynching in Smithville, Charlotte county, Virginia in May, 1886. Afterwards, someone sent Mitchell a rope with a note attached to it, warning that he would also be lynched if he ever set foot in Smithville. He responded with a line from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar:
“There are no terrors, Cassius, in your threats, for I am so strong in honesty that they pass by me like the idle wind, which I respect not.”
Afterwards, armed with two Smith & Wesson pistols, Michell took a train to Smithville and walked five miles from the station to see the site of the hanging.
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This is an example of just how far right-wing disinformation will go. According to the narration in this video: “The Holocaust stuff was about them (the New York Times) not wanting to be seen as a Jewish-owned newspaper, because this was America in the 1940s, there was a lot of antisemitism. They were afraid it would jeopardize their position in the market, and for them, that was just something they would not sacrifice, even for the truth. They actually forbade the word “Jew” in their news reports during that period.”
That seemed pretty far fetched on the face of it, so we fact checked the claim that the word “Jew” could not show up in the New York Times. In fact, using a full text ProQuest database search of the Times, for the words “Jews or Jewish” in the date range 1933 – 1946, we found 95,085 articles over 5114 days (14 years), for an average of 18.6 articles mentioning Jews or Jewish people per day.
The media “expert” in the video also says that the New York Times w0n Pulitzer prizes during World War II for pro-Nazi coverage. In fact, checking the roster of Pulitzers from 1942 through 1946, there are no prizes for the Times coverage of the European war. There are two for Pacific war coverage, and one in 1941 for general coverage of the emerging war. Astonishingly, there are none for “pro-Nazi” coverage.
So yes, this Prager video is promoting outright lies with the intention of portraying the New York Times as antisemitic and racist.
Also See:
American Public Opinion and the Holocaust (Gallup polls)
Samantha Bee and Prager U “Prager U is as much of a real college as Monsters University.”
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Posted in Media Law, Resistance to injustice, Videos
Revolutions in Communication is about the printers, reporters, photographers, filmmakers, advertisers, PR practitioners, broadcasters, computer geeks, and all the rebels and visionaries who were ahead of their times, who led the times, and who created The Times. This critically acclaimed survey of media history is now in a second edition.
The book surveys the history of all major communications disciplines, including journalism, photography, cinema, advertising & public relations, radio, television, computing and networked media. (MORE)
Ida Tarbell, American muckraking journalist who wrote The History of the Standard Oil Co., is born on this day in 1857. The book was first published in a series of McClure's Magazine articles in 1902. It detailed underhanded, dishonest tactics employed by John D. Rockefeller and Standard Oil company to establish a monopoly over kerosene in the US. It led to anti-trust (anti-monopoly) laws that broke up Standard Oil in 1911. In her long career, Tarbell also wrote and spoke on subjects including the evils of war, world peace, American politics, trusts, tariffs, labor practices, and women’s issues.¶ American Printing History Association
¶ Journalism History AEJMC publication.
¶ European media history by EGO publishers, Germany, is a transcultural history of Europe on the Internet.
¶ The Media History Project was launched in Sept. 2011 as an online research site with especially good magazine and film archives.
¶ Chronicling America is a massive database of US publications organized by the Library of Congress. A great place to find and read the originals.
¶ Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Division
¶ Newspaper heroes on the air -- Radio plays about journalism, organized by Bob Stepno, help put the cultural impact of journalism into context for the 1930s - 1950s.
¶ Editor & Publisher magazine at Internet Archive
¶ Domitor is an international organization devoted to cinema before 1915.
¶ American Journalism Historians Association is one of the groups working in media history.
¶ Center for Civil War photography puts rare visual treasures on display.
¶ The Story of Information a blog about how information changes daily life.
¶ Museum of Broadcast Communications
¶ History of American Journalism, University of Kentucky
¶ 
Media law and ethics site as a companion to this media history site is now available. Of interest to historians: history of copyright, also history of libel, and history of advertising law.
¶ Media 2070: An invitation to dream up media reparations.
Early Dageurotypes by African American photographers James P. Ball, Glenalvin Goodridge, and Augustus Washington are part of a new display at the Smithsonian Institution.
Beatrice L. Warde, a typographer and author of the famous short essays: "This is a Printing Office" and "The Crystal Goblet, should have been included in Tom Hanks' 2021 film News of the World. In the original book of the same name, the "captain" quotes Warde at length. For more about Warde, see this article from the American Printing History Association.
Bruno Barbey a photographer for the Magnum Photos agency, known as a powerful visual architect, and perhaps one of the last great war photographers in the humane style of Robert Capa, died at age 79 in France Nov. 9, 2020. He was 79 years old.
Ida B Wells, a black journalist and women's suffrage leader in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, is remembered in this mosaic at Union train station at the US Capitol in Washington DC.
Dorothea Lange photo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York shows a remarkable and enduring photojournalist.
William Monroe Trotter, a radical black newspaperman, is profiled in the Nov. 25, 2019 issue of the New Yorker. Trotter rejected the view that racial equality could come in stages.
William Yukon Chang’s monthly Chinese-American Times chronicled life, culture and politics in the Chinese community in New York, according to his New York Times obituary.
Margaret Bourke-White photos are featured in the Atlantic Magazine in August, 2019.
Tank Man by Jeff Widener is one of 100 greatest photos described in a Time Magazine online feature.
Harold Edgerton, a pioneer of high speed photography, is remembered in this July 2019 Smithsonian video about filming atomic explosions.
Evelyn Berezin, invented the word processor in the 1960s to lighten the load of secretaries worldwide. She is remembered in this New York Times obit.
PBS archives will be opened at the University of Georgia. According to a July, 2018 article in the Red & Black, around 4,000 hours of PBS programs from 1941-1999 will be released. The programs were once submitted for Peabody Awards.
Virtual Reality will have the same emotional effect on audiences that photography did in the 19th century, says Stanford professor Jeremy Bailenson.
/https://public-media.smithsonianmag.com/filer/b4/ec/b4ec2608-cfe6-4187-a1de-7dbe856c1e11/lowell_thomas_magic_dials_1.jpg)
Lowell Thomas, a man who helped define print and radio journalism in the early to mid-20th century, is profiled in the Smithsonian Magazine, June, 2017.
Fake news isn't so new after all. In "Techniques of 19th-century fake news reporter," Petra S. McGillen of Dartmouth tells the story of Theodor Fontane, a correspondent for Kreuzzeitung of Berlin, who covered London's Tooley Street Fire of 1861 without leaving Germany.
Clare Hollingworth, the reporter who broke the news about the start of WWII from Poland, is eulogized in this Jan. 2017 obituary.
Ring Lardner a famous sports columnist in the early 20th century, is profiled in a 2017 book by NPR's Ron Rapoport.
TV and US Civil Rights A 17-minute television talk by Medgar Evers on May 20, 1963 -- which led to his assassination -- also resulted in a fight over a TV station license in a case that changed American Television. The NARA and the Zinn project have the story.
Rome, Open City by Roberto Rossollini is celebrated on its 70th anniversary.
Unrecognized women of ENIAC are finally getting some recognition thanks to the ENIAC programmers project.
Lost Gordon Parks photos never ran in Life Magazine, on display now at Boston Fine Arts Museum.
Birth of a Nation turns 100 NPR's excellent radio & web article about cinema director D.W. Griffith and the legacy of a virulently racist American film. Also noteworthy - Zinn project article by William Katz.
The Wipers Times, a humor publication from the least humorous situation ever -- the fighting trenches of WWI. Subject of an excellent movie in 2013.
Ixnay on the Otography-fay Life in the trenches was no laughing matter for most. It was even illegal for soldiers to photograph during World War I, but George Hackney did it anyway. The photos came to light in November, 2014.
Nixon-Kennedy debates in September, 1960 brought the new power of media to bear on the old politics of the presidential campaigns, as this recent Chicago Tribune article reminds us.
Dorothea Lange the amazing Depression-era photographer, is featured in a new PBS documentary in August, 2014.
Too Fast for the Truth? The trans-Atlantic telegraph, first linking the US and the UK in 1858, generated the same kind of reaction and commentary about rapid communication that surrounded the Internet in the 1990s and micro-blogging in the 2000s. Adriene LaFrance reminds us of this in a great July 28, 2014 article in the Atlantic.
¶ 
Over 85,000 British Pathe newsreels with over 8 3,500 hours of news and entertainment, were made available by British Pathe company through YouTube in April, 2014.
¶ Harry McAlpin, the man who integrated the White House press corps, is featured in an Atlantic magazine article May 3.
Pranking is a great media tradition, says Kimbrew McLeod in a new book. (Yes, that's Ben Franklin in clown makeup).
¶ May 5 is the Chicago Defender's anniversary. Founded by Robert S. Abbott in 1905, the Defender has championed the cause of minorities for over a century.
Dr. Zhivago, the famed novel by Boris Pasternak about a Russian doctor in the 1917-1940 revolutionary time period, was banned in Russia. It was first published in Russian by the US Central Intelligence Agency, newly declassified documents reveal. (Guardian, April 9, 2014).
Margaret Fuller biography by Megan Marshall wins a Pulitzer for 2014. Horace Greeley's famed editor was also remembered in a variety of radio programs, as found on Bob Stepno's JHeroes web site.
¶ Ancient books online The Vatican and Oxford's Bodleian libraries began a project in December, 2013 to digitize their collections of ancient books in the interest of democratizing scholarship.
¶ 100th anniversary of Robert Capa's birth was Oct. 22, 2013. The famed Hungarian-American combat photographer once said: "If your pictures aren't good enough, you are not close enough." With that in mind, Magnum is running a "get closer" contest.
¶ Most silent films lost A US Library of Congress survey found that only 14 percent of silent films have survived over the past century. Washington Post, Dec. 4, 2013.
¶
The International Herald Tribune a Paris based newspaper, is no more. It will turn into the International New York Times on Oct. 15, 2013.
¶ 
Alan Turing a gay British mathe- matician who helped crack Nazi codes during WWII and who created many of the basic concepts and formulas for the modern functioning computer, was pardoned for his gay behavior, postumously, in Britain just before Christmas, 2013.
¶ 
Early Orson Wells film discovered in Italy, according to the New York Times, Aug. 7, 2013.
¶ End of Kodak Great article in The Street by Joe Deaux about the final days at the photographic giant.
¶ Ben Franklin museum reopening in Philadelphia this August, 2013.
¶ Social networking in the 1600s involved coffee houses says Tom Standage in the International Herald Tribune June 22, 2013.
¶ 
Anti-Nazi documentary produced in 1934 by US filmmaker Neil Vanderbilt was rediscovered in Belgium this year. Story by Emily Greenhouse, May 21, 2013: The New Yorker.
¶
Cartoons that changed the world are posted from The Art of Controversy, previewed in Buzzfeed, May 2, 2013.
¶ Cincinnati Inquirer historical photo tour includes horseshoe-shaped copy desk (17) and linotype machines (12). March 6, 2013.
¶ Photographer Tony Vaccaro is celebrated by the New York Times. March 4, 2013.
¶
Thomas Nast is remembered by Jonathan Yardley at the Washington Post on Feb. 15, 2013. "The best and most widely known journalists of my youth — James Reston, Marquis Childs, Red Smith, even Walter Lippmann — are almost entirely forgotten outside the trade today and only dimly remembered inside it," Yardley says. Yet Nast's cartoons remain.
¶ Medgar Evers is honored by the Zinn project on Martin Luther King day in 2013. Evers was killed 50 years ago after an interview on what was then a virulently racist television station, WLBT, as noted in Revolutions in Communication. The assassination was not directly linked to the TV, but it started a Media Access Project investigation of the TV station's programming, which led to the loss of its license for failing to serve the public interest.
¶ Iranian newspapers in the 1960s were tightly controlled, like many today in China, Russia and the Middle East. That experience, says Karen Henderson in a Dec. 15 2012 Cleveland Plain Dealer column, reminds us of the importance of the press to democracy.
¶ The "Page Three Girl" is 42 years old on Nov. 27, 2012, according to women fighting sexism in the media who are staging protests in London. Their slogan: "Boobs are not news."
¶ Hollywood blacklist started 65 years ago on Nov. 25, 1947, the day after ten writers and directors (the Hollywood Ten) got citations for contempt of Congress. They had refused to name supposed fellow communists to the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and claimed that they had rights under the U.S. Constitution.
¶ Elijah Lovejoy, a publisher in Alton Illinois, is killed by an angry pro-slavery mob on Nov. 7, 1835. The anniversary was noted by the Zinn Education Project.
"Imprudent, to defend the liberty of the press? ... Who invents this libel on his country?" -- Wendell Phillips, in speech given in Boston, one month after the November 7, 1837, slaying of abolitionist editor Elijah Lovejoy in Illinois. (Text from Project Gutenberg.)
¶ The Radical Camera, an exhibit opening in San Francisco in October, 2012, looks back to the age when photography was a social witness.
¶ Edward Curtis took photos of 19th century Native Americans. A new biography is out called Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher: the Epic Life and Immortal Photographs of Edward Curtis. The author tells NPR's Rachel Martin that Curtis discovered his first subject almost by accident.
James Gordon Bennett Jr. is remembered (although not very fondly) on the 125th anniversary of the International Herald Tribune in this New York Times article.
¶ Gordon Parks is remembered in a photo gallery published by the New York Times. The former FSA photographer's work is up close, personal and brilliant. He would have been 100 this year.
¶ USA Today remembers the Nixon-Kennedy TV debates. They began Sept. 20, 1960 and are credited with changing political history.
¶ One hundred years ago, the Sacramento Bee depicted a prisoner on a pedestal to decry "soft" treatment of prisoners who should be executed. Today the Bee has a very different view.
¶ William Randolph Hearst died Aug. 14, 1951, and this year the San Francisco Chronicle commemorated the event by republishing an interesting poem he wrote. When our life has passed / And the river has run its course / It again goes back / O'er the selfsame track / To the mountain which was its source. Hearst, it seems, was no competition for other journalist / poets of the age, such as Rudyard Kipling or Joel Chandler Harris.
¶ So long to Karl Fleming, a Civil Rights reporter for Newsweek whose book, Son of the Rough South, helped chronicle the era. Fleming died in Los Angeles August 11, 2012. Also passing this summer: Helen Gurley Brown of Cosmopolitan magazine.
¶ Happy 150th birthday to Ida B. Wells, the intrepid reporter who exposed lynchings across the US South in the 1890s. Original work is here at Project Gutenberg; thanks also to the Zinn History Project for noticing.
¶ Satellite communications turned 50 years old on July 12. The first satellite transmissions took place in 1962 from Maine to Brittany, France. The signal contained images of the Statue of Liberty and the Eiffel Tower, remarks from President John F. Kennedy, and highlights of a Phillies-Cubs baseball game.
¶ The first photo on the web was posted twenty years ago at CERN in Switzerland. (SF Chronicle also covered it.)
¶ The history of the telephone is tucked away in an AT&T vault . in New Jersey.
¶ It's the end of the line for Minitel, the original French internet built in the 1980s.
¶ Alan Turing was the most significant contributor to computing in the 1930s and 40s. June 23, 2012, would have been his 100th birthday. Wired magazine has a good overview of the man and his impact.
¶ New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art is hosting an exhibit of China's printed images from the 8th - 20th centuries.
¶ The Library of Congress has published a book containing 200 years of political campaign posters. It's a treasure of visual communication history.
¶ Radio history's sentinel -- J. David Goldin -- is profiled in a Washington Post story May 3, 2012.
¶ Media history is celebrated in Google "doodles" . Over the past few years they have included Eadweard Muybridge , photographer Robert Doisneau , Louis Daguerre, and historian Ibn Khaldun.
¶ An old fashioned newspaper war has broken out in California, over a century-old conflict involving John Muir, a hydroelectric dam and the Hetch Hetchy canyon in the heart of Yosemite.
¶ The Hearst Corp. is 125 years old in March, 2012, and at least one newspaper, the San Francisco Chronicle, is celebrating.
¶ Beginning in late February 2012, the New York Times started to open its enormous photo archive.
¶ Stanford has cracked the door on its collection of Apple computer corporation archives, according to this Associated Press story. But its not enough for some people, who think the university should be doing more to make the archives public.
¶ New digital methods are starting to unlock the "vast collections" of sound recordings. A young Alexander Graham Bell is heard in some of the first Smithsonian releases on Dec. 12, 2011. Also in store -- great performances, speeches by world leaders, anthropological and linguistic studies, and many other voices from the past.
¶ Nov. 18 would have been Louis Daguerre's 224th birthday, and Google's search page celebrated with a one-day logo in commemoration.
¶ The London Science museum will build Charles Babbage's analytical engine, first envisioned in the 1830s, according to an article in the Nov. 8, 2011 New York Times.
¶ The 200th anniversary of Niles Register is celebrated by the Baltimore Sun and others.
¶ Aug. 25 is the anniversary of the Moon Hoax. Chicago Times columnist John Kass says it's his favorite hoax of all time.
¶ Aug. 24 is Wayzgoose -- a traditional holiday for printers, writers and the publishing industry.
¶ July 22 was the 100th anniversary of Marshall McLuhan's birth, and the communications and technology theorist celebrated by his most fervid admirers as Canada's greatest thinker of all time has emerged from the valley of darkness that closed around him in the last decade of his life. The Globe and Mail, July 15, 2011.
¶ The Pentagon Papers are being declassified, 40 years after they were published in the New York Times and Washington Post. Daniel Ellsberg says the Pentagon papers are still important today.
¶ Bob Woodward and Ben Bradley are welcomed at the Nixon library in April. The library's new exhibit portrayed journalists in a new and much more favorable light.
¶ Obama administration wants more international cooperation within the ICANN.
¶ Why is good news so hard to come by?The Montreal Gazette tackles the question.
¶ Peter Forsskål's 1759 Thoughts on Civil Liberty was recently published on the web. The Swedish philosopher had a major influence on European thought about freedom of information. The newly translated manuscript begins: "The more a man may live according to his own inclinations, the more he is free. Therefore, next to life itself, nothing could be more dear to man than freedom."
¶ Phil Meyer wonders whether it's already too late for the elite newspaper of the future.
¶ Kay Mills, author of "A Place in the News: From the Women's Pages to the Front Page" (1988), died Jan. 15, 2011.
¶ Fox Propagandists Degrade Journalism - Harold Meyerson, Washington Post. -- Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. "is the most sustained and coordinated dose of right-wing propaganda this country has ever seen. Father Coughlin, Joe McCarthy, George Wallace and their ilk were freelancers, much as Limbaugh is today. The choir at Fox News, by contrast, sings from Murdoch's hymnal."
¶ For Sarah Palin and Glen Beck, a McKinley Moment? Dana Milbank, Washington Post -- "One hundred and ten years ago, during another low point in the nation's political discourse, newspapers owned by William Randolph Hearst - who was angling for a presidential run in 1904 - published a pair of columns fantasizing about violence against President William McKinley. "
Although the Civil War began as a conflict over secession, from the start most blacks saw it as an opportunity to free the enslaved with a Union victory. New York Times, March 13, 2014.
Stopping the presses