News Gems

Fourth of July

2008-07-04T08:47:00Z

Brian and I are taking the day off from News Gems to celebrate our country's birthday. If you have a hankering to see some good journalism while we're gone, check out our archives on the left rail. We hope you all have a great holiday. See you back here for more Gems on Monday. ...(read more)

Olympic Dreams

2008-07-03T08:04:00Z

NPR is running some inspiring stories about athletes who hope to compete in this summer's Olympics. "Olympic Profiles: Bound for Beijing" stories describing the Iraqi sprinter who dodges sniper fire as she trains, a shot-putter experimenting with hypnotherapy, the tae kwon do hopeful who is trying to become Afghanistan's first medal winner and the Alabama boxer who rose from obscurity to Golden Gloves champion in three years. My favorite is Wendy Kaufman's profile...(read more)

Mid-East Media War

2008-07-02T05:32:00Z

Craig Whitlock of The Washington Post has written a revealing two-part series on the Mid-East media campaigns of the U.S. government and al-Qaeda. It's fascinating to compare the campaigns' structures and their results. The centerpiece of Washington's campaign is the Arabic-language TV network al-Hurra, which Whitlock describes in "U.S. Network Falters in Mideast Mission." Al-Hurra is a bureaucratic system plagued by inefficiencies and mistakes. Since its inception, al-Hurra has been plagued by...(read more)

Scenes From a Recovery

2008-07-01T08:04:00Z

Bill Reiter, sports reporter at The Kansas City Star, visited storm-ravaged Iowa to report on the recovery efforts. The result, "Iowans Are Reclaiming Their Lives and Their Sports," uses scenes from Des Moines, Parkersburg, West Des Moines, Ames, Waterloo and Iowa City to show how "a state trying to put itself together has done so, in small but meaningful ways, through sports." In the following excerpt, the people of Parkersburg and its neighboring communities demonstrate the Iowans' spirit. ….The...(read more)

Covert Action

2008-06-30T08:20:00Z

Seymour Hersh has a long history of helping break important stories: the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, the C.I.A.'s illegal spying against Americans, the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, and many more. In the July 7 New Yorker, Hersh returns with another scoop. His "Preparing the Battlefield" details how Congress has approved funding for a Bush administration secret request to escalate covert operations in Iran. With his usual meticulousness, Hersh reports that clandestine operations designed...(read more)

Mortgage Mess

2008-06-27T08:11:00Z

Black Americans are much more likely than whites to get stuck paying high interest rates for their mortgages than whites, according to a comprehensive investigation by Aliza Appelbaum and Alden K. Loury of The Chicago Reporter. Their "An Equal Opportunity to Pay More" reports that the disparity holds true in each of the 251 metropolitan areas studied, even when blacks make the same income as whites. Analyzing 8.5 million mortgages granted nationwide in 2006 (the most recent year the data was...(read more)

Just Wait....

2008-06-26T08:07:00Z

Associated Press Texas sports editor Jaime Aron has written an excellent narrative about his premature twin sons' fight for life, "Born Too Soon." There's much to recommend this story – it has just enough details, it moves at a nice pace, Aron shares his thoughts at several key points – but the feature I like best is how he builds and sustains dramatic tension. He begins with a scene where he's giving a speech to parents of preemies. Eyes widened when I held up red and blue Beanie Babies that were...(read more)

They Watch Every Blip

2008-06-25T08:31:00Z

"The Flight Watchmen" by Laura Blumenfeld of The Washington Post is a fine example of how to tell a larger story be tracking a few people through an ordinary day. The day starts slowly as Chan Browne, 44, makes a sandwich for his girlfriend's daughter's lunch. The little girl goes off to school, and Browne goes to his job as an assistant special agent in charge at the Freedom Center, a counterterrorism compound in Northern Virginia. There the officers have one assignment: Stop another 9/11. Much...(read more)

Drenched But Not Defeated

2008-06-24T08:02:00Z

Two weeks ago News Gems applauded the work of The Des Moines Register as it covered the tornados that pummeled the Midwest. Today I want to give a special shout out to their fellow Iowans at The Cedar Rapids Gazette who are still putting out a newspaper and Web site despite the floods that devastated their city and ruined many staff members' homes. Like the New Orleans Times-Picayune and Biloxi Sun Herald after Hurricane Katrina, The Gazette has excelled under trying circumstances...(read more)

Detainees

2008-06-23T08:57:00Z

Two stories in the past week have taken us deep inside the war against terrorism to show us the people, places and techniques that the U.S. government has tried to keep hidden. In Sunday's New York Times, "Inside a 9/11 Mastermind's Interrogation" by Scott Shane introduces us to the CIA interrogator who was in charge of getting the truth out of Al Qaeda's "engineer of mass murder," Khalid Shaikh Mohammed. Shane's story is a fascinating look at how CIA interrogations work and the improvised nature...(read more)

A Sharp Eye on Mass Transit

2008-06-20T08:33:00Z

Miami-Dade County commissioners are considering tax hikes to fund their crumbling mass transit system. County taxpayers have been there before. In 2002, after rejecting four previous proposals for transit tax hikes, they approved a sales tax. Now, in an outstanding series called "Taken for a Ride," Larry Lebowitz of The Miami Herald examines the results. In 2002, voters were promised up to 88.9 miles of new Metrorail lines, stretching to every corner of Miami-Dade County. As it stands, you'll be...(read more)

Government Screw-Ups

2008-06-19T08:52:00Z

I've seen a couple of great examples recently of television networks serving as watchdogs when the government acts with complete insensitivity toward some of its most vulnerable citizens. Brian Ross and Vic Walter of ABC News, in conjunction with Audrey Hudson of the Washington Times, describe in "Disposable Heroes" how the Veterans Administration recruited mentally distressed veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan war to test drugs that have been linked to violent side effects, including suicide....(read more)

The Housing Bubble

2008-06-18T08:51:00Z

"Anatomy of a Meltdown: The Credit Crisis" by Alec Klein and Zachary A. Goldfarb of The Washington Post is a comprehensive, readable account of the housing boom and bust. In the first section of this three-part series, they trace the bubble's roots to fiscal and monetary policies adopted after the collapse of the Internet bubble. The government's efforts to counter the pain of that bust soon pumped air into the next bubble: housing. The Bush administration pushed two big tax cuts, and the Federal...(read more)

Iraq Today

2008-06-17T08:09:00Z

For a terrific overview of the current state of Iraq, check out this week's issue of The Economist. In "Iraq: Is it Finally Turning the Corner?" the magazine puts the country's political, military, economic and social situations in clear perspective. While noting the mountains of trauma and difficulties that still exist in Iraq, the article finds reasons for optimism: Iraq's future is still full of pitfalls. The sectarian chasms remain deep, the wounds of strife raw. But for the first...(read more)

Undercover in Myanmar

2008-06-16T08:45:00Z

More than a month after Cyclone Nargis killed tens of thousands of people in Myanmar, the military regime continues to deny unhindered access to the disaster zone. To reach the affected regions, a Los Angeles Times staff writer hid in the holds of riverboats as they traveled through the Irrawaddy River delta. The writer, who is unidentified to protect those who worked with him, shares his findings in "In Myanmar, a Times Reporter Worked in Secret to Cover the Story." Here's what he found in...(read more)