Category Archives: Journalism/Media

Quote of the Month: “It’s the First Amendment, stupid”

Walker was named by Barack Obama in 2018.

[NOTE: the CNN Business report cited below deals with an abortion rights vote coming in Florida. But this blog post, while not discounting the importance of that issue, is focused on a judge in a related lawsuit. More specifically, on a ruling he issued last week. Even more, on a five-word summary of the basis for the decision, which echoes like a thunderclap. The rest is needful context, but the aphorism will, I believe, be what is remembered long after the details have receded into the mists.]

. . . “It’s the First Amendment, stupid.”

That’s what a federal judge wrote Thursday (October 17) as he sided with local TV stations in an extraordinary dispute over a pro-abortion rights television ad. Chief U.S. District Judge Mark E. Walker of the Northern District of Florida granted a temporary restraining order against Florida’s surgeon general after the state health department threatened to bring criminal charges against broadcasters airing the ad.[/caption]

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A New Book: A Quaker’s Life in Our “Interesting,” Tumultuous Times

Emma Lapsansky-Werner and Chuck Fager at the Quaker History Roundtable, summer of 2017

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NPR Suspends Internal Critic

 

AP News: NPR suspends editor who criticized his employer for what he calls an unquestioned liberal worldview

Uri Berliner

NEW YORK (AP) — National Public Radio has suspended a veteran editor who wrote an outside essay criticizing his employer for, in his view, journalism that reflects a liberal viewpoint with little tolerance for contrary opinions.

Uri Berliner, a senior editor on NPRs business desk, was suspended five days without pay, according to an article posted Tuesday by NPRs media correspondent, David Folkenflik. He wrote that Berliner was told he violated the companys policy that it must approve work done for outside news organizations.

Berliner told NPR that he was not appealing the suspension. An NPR spokeswoman said the company would not comment on individual personnel matters.

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Will NPR’s Internal Dissenter Outlast My Cabbage??

Will NPR’s public dissenter lose his job before the cabbage in my fridge goes under the knife?

There’s a purple cabbage in my fridge. Cabbages will last pretty long if they are kept cold. But I plan to take it out one day soon, chop it up, then cook it with onions in a simple but delectable recipe I learned from my late lamented next door neighbor, Ms. Hazel.  It’s good.

But this post isn’t about a recipe. It’s  echoing a vegetable question I read about while dipping into online newspapers from England in late October 2022. Continue reading Will NPR’s Internal Dissenter Outlast My Cabbage??

Gwynne Dyer On the Navalny Murder

By Gwynne Dyer

Feb. 19, 2024

Vladimir Putin’s regime had been assassinating Chechen warlords, defectors from the Russian intelligence services and sundry wayward oligarchs for years, but its first political murder was the hit on high-profile journalist Anna Politkovskaya, who was gunned down in her Moscow apartment in 2006 — and so it has been ever since.

Anna Politkovskaya,

Attacks on Russian ex-intelligence agents on foreign soil, however, are conducted more discreetly, by poisonings, not by mob-style shootings, e.g. Alexander Litvinenko, killed in London by radioactive polonium-200 dropped in his tea, and Sergei Skripal, poisoned by the nerve agent novichok smeared on his doorknob (but survived) in Salisbury, England.
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