The Washington Independent

Posts Tagged Journalism

How Transparent Is This White House?

By | 04.02.10 | 3:46 pm

If it seems that news reporters are relying more and more on unnamed government sources in their story-telling, it’s because we are.

Much of that is our own fault. In the ever-quickening race to scoop others, the information or the quote often trumps the insistence on identifying its source. In More…

For the Record, I Am Not on the CIA Payroll

By | 12.17.09 | 9:52 am

Charlie Savage and Scott Shane have a great story today about U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies improperly spying on constitutionally protected activities of American citizens. Overcollection, as it’s euphemistically known in the intelligence business, has, unsurprisingly, occurred for years, despite official denials in the Bush administration. One American More…

Andrew Breitbart Launching More ‘Big’ Sites

By | 12.10.09 | 3:19 pm

Andrew Breitbart, whom I profiled after his Big Government website launched the unfolding video sting investigation of ACORN, talks to Colby Hall about some of the sites he’ll launch in 2010. I had thought “Big Environment” would be first, but the next site will actually be “Big Journalism,” followed More…

The Pentagon’s Journalist-Vetting Program

By | 08.27.09 | 9:18 am

For years, reporters who embedded with the U.S. military in Iraq have traded rumors that the embed office had a blacklist for journalists whose work was unflattering. It generally takes months to work out embeds, a process that involves the submission of clips from the outset. Sometimes embeds fall through, More…

Reporters Fail to Fact-Check Cheney

By | 08.25.09 | 11:58 am

Four months ago, Mike Allen and Josh Gerstein of Politico reported that former Vice President Dick Cheney was “pushing the CIA to declassify files that he claims would vindicate the CIA’s use of coercive interrogation techniques that President Barack Obama has banned.” It was one of many stories that More…

Freedom for Roxana Saberi

By | 05.11.09 | 8:57 am

Extremely relieving news for a Monday morning:

An Iranian appeals court has reduced the eight-year jail sentence for Iranian-American journalist Roxana Saberi to a suspended two-year term and she will soon be freed, her defense lawyer told Reuters on Monday.

Reuters further reported that Saberi’s parents will pick her up More…

Lede of the Day

By | 05.01.09 | 12:43 pm

John Hawkins wins the Internet:

When I was in college, I studied Southern Long Fist Kung Fu for more than a year and my teacher told me something that I never forgot.

I’d like to think that the F. Scott Fitzgerald rip is intentional. Sadly, the rest of the More…

The NSA, Journalism, and Status Anxiety

By | 01.22.09 | 9:26 am

National Security Agency whistleblower Russ Tice took to MSNBC’s “Countdown” yesterday to talk about Bush administration surveillance policies that, like many others, he didn’t want to get into while George W. Bush was still president. Among those revelations was that the NSA didn’t just take so-called meta-data (the address on More…

That’s What I Call Reporting!

By | 01.05.09 | 9:07 am

Michelle Malkin, taking umbrage at Matthew Yglesias’s assertion that there aren’t many conservative bloggers with reporting skills (“Bullcrap.”), suggests the work of Bay Area-based Zombie.

Internet journalist/blogger and Little Green Footballs regular Zombie (not “conservative” per se, but rather anti-sharia/anti-jihad/anti-anti-American/anti-extremist Left) did extraordinary work digging up documents

More…