journalism

In December of 2006, Mexico's new President Felipe Calderón declared war on the drug cartels, reversing earlier government passiveness. Since then, the government has made some gains, but at a heavy price - gun battles, assasinations, kidnappings, fights between rival cartels, and reprisals have resulted in over 9,500 deaths since December 2006 - over 5,300 killed last year alone. President Barack Obama recently announced extra agents were being deployed to the border and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton heads to Mexico today to pursue a broad diplomatic agenda - overshadowed now by spiraling drug violence and fears of greater cross-border spillover. Officials on both sides of the border are committed to stopping the violence, and stemming the flow of drugs heading north and guns and cash heading south.

I pick on the New York Times a lot for its flubs, not because I hate the paper or because I own some nearly worthless shares in the company. I do it because the journalism done there still matters.

Over the weekend and yesterday we saw examples of the organization's better and lesser sides.

Media Matters has named Sean Hannity as 2008's misinformer of the year. There's a long list of examples of his rank dishonesty in the service of political ends.

By the way, I've got the perfect replacement for Alan Colmes: Hannity should just use a ventriloquist's dummy (that's all Colmes was most of the time anyway).

During a military judicial hearing on Monday in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and four other detainees charged with coordinating the attacks of September 11th told Judge Col. Stephen Henley that they wished to stop filing legal motions and to confess in full. However, some of the detainees hedged their statement - suggesting they might change their minds if they could not be assured of execution. By January, some of the nearly 250 men at Guantánamo Bay Detention Facility will have been locked up for seven years. Collected here are photos of the multiple detention facilities at Guantánamo Bay - all photographs either reviewed by or released by the U.S. Military. (30 photos total)

"Like they're reading a science article written by a journalism major"

The Free Flow of Information Act has just cleared the House by a vote of 398-21, but that doesn't mean President Bush has any interest in signing it. The bill would offer protection of sources and documents to journalists (including professional bloggers) caught up in federal investigations, and could put an end to images of reporters led from court in handcuffs after refusing to testify. The Bush administration sees it as carte blanche to leak government information without penalty, though.

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The Act was cosponsored by Rick Boucher (D-VA) and Mike Pence (R-IN), who are both concerned that no media shield law currently exists at the federal level. More than thirty states have such laws, and Boucher argued after the vote that the very prevalence of such laws showed just important they were. "Such overwhelming support for assuring the confidentiality of journalists' sources at the state level lays bare the glaring lack of similar protections at the federal level," he said.

I don't agree with the logic that if 30 out of 50 states have a law at the state level, that there should be a federal law covering the other 20 states.