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Originally published 07/08/2013
Austin Goodrich, Cold War CIA officer and CBS correspondent, dies at 87

Austin Goodrich, an undercover CIA officer during the Cold War who also worked for several years as a CBS television correspondent before his identity was unmasked, died June 9 at his home in Port Washington, Wis. He was 87.He had Alzheimer’s disease, his daughter Kristina Goodrich said.Mr. Goodrich, a rugged onetime football lineman, fought in World War II and later studied in Sweden while he was attending the University of Michigan. He joined the relatively new Central Intelligence Agency soon after his graduation from Michigan in 1949.While stationed in Oslo and Stockholm early in his clandestine career, he sought a suitable occupation to cover his true profession. He assumed a dual identity as reporter and spy....

Originally published 06/02/2013
Jonathan Zimmerman: Protect the Watchdog Press – from Obama

Jonathan Zimmerman teaches history and education at New York University. He is the author of “Small Wonder: The Little Red Schoolhouse in History and Memory” (Yale University Press).Did the White House misrepresent the Benghazi, Libya, attacks to cover up its own ineptitude? Did the Internal Revenue Service purposefully target conservative groups for scrutiny?Americans rely on journalists to cast light on these thorny issues. But if reporters can’t do their jobs, everyone else will most likely remain in the dark about serious government mistakes.That’s why all Americans should be deeply alarmed about the Obama administration’s recent investigations of news organizations, which have drawn far less ink than the Benghazi or IRS scandals. And that’s exactly backward. The most worrisome threat right now is to the people who actually produce the ink: US journalists.

Originally published 04/28/2013
Is the Press Too Big to Fail?

Image via Shutterstock.Originally posted on TomDispatch.com

Originally published 03/18/2013
Eric Boehlert: Could Twitter Have Prevented the Iraq War?

Eric Boehlert, a former senior writer for Salon, is the author of "Lapdogs: How the Press Rolled Over for Bush." Responding to a barrage of criticism he received for a factually inaccurate and flawed column he wrote this month about the sequestration battle, New York Times columnist Bill Keller wrote a follow-up blog post to detail how critics had hounded him online, especially via Twitter.Denouncing the social media tool’s tendency to produce what he called mean and shallow commentary, Keller lamented Twitter’s suddenly pervasive power. “It is always on, and it gets inside your head,” he wrote, adding, “there is no escape.” Indeed, within days of writing his column, Keller felt compelled to pen a lengthy piece about his Twitter encounter.

Originally published 02/24/2013
War is a Dirty Business

Wounded soldier – Autumn 1916, Bapaume by Otto Dix (1924).Originally posted on the Huffington Post.When's the last time our media covered war honestly? When's the last time you saw combat footage of American troops under fire, or of American troops killing others in the name of keeping us safe from enemies? When was the last time you saw an American soldier panicking, firing wildly, perhaps killing members of his own unit (fratricide) or innocent civilians caught in the crossfire of war? Maybe in the 1960s during coverage of the Vietnam War?War is not glorious. It may feature noble deeds and remarkable sacrifices, but it also features brutality and many other bloody realities. War breaks men (and women) down. It does so because war is unnatural. Yes, war is many things, but it most certainly is about killing. Occasionally, the killing is even necessary. (Just ask those enslaved by the Nazis or the Japanese whether they greeted Allied troops as liberators.)