EDITORIAL CONTRIBUTOR

Edward Wasserman

Edward Wasserman, a veteran South Florida newspaper editor and writer, is dean of the Graduate School of Journalism, University of California, Berkeley. He was previously Knight professor of journalism ethics at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Va. Before that, Wasserman worked for news organizations in Maryland, Wyoming and New York City, was executive business editor of The Miami Herald and CEO and editor in chief of American Lawyer Media's Miami-based Daily Business Review chain. He was educated at Yale, the University of Paris and the London School of Economics.

Top Story

EDWARD SNOWDEN

Whistleblowers aren’t treated so harshly everywhere

300 dpi 3 col x 8.5 in / 146x216 mm / 497x734 pixels Geoffrey Blaesing color illustration of an informant hiding in the shadows giving information to a reporter standing in the light. Milwaukee Journal Sentinel 2002

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KEYWORDS: deep throat spy spies espionage reporter informer informant leak whistle blower illustration espia espionaje espiar columbrar reportero informante informador geranio ilustracion grabado contributed blaesing mw 2002

By the standards of other countries, the U.S. approach to official secrecy is ferocious.

GOVERNMENT SURVEILLANCE

Secrecy, surveillance pose challenge to media

In recent weeks, the gleaming Digital Age has been flipped over, exposing a dank underbelly of post-9/11 secrecy and surveillance reminiscent of a mid-20th-century police state, implicating not just government but Silicon Valley, too, in wide-ranging use and misuse of information.
GOOGLE GLASS

Google’s Glass would keep an eye on all of us

Google’s launch of its dazzling Internet-connected eyewear, which it calls Glass, has been so understated that it’s tempting to mistake this wearable computer for just another cool plaything from Silicon Valley.
KOCH BROTHERS

When ideological warriors join the news business

News and opinion parted company fairly late in the history of journalism, a split usually dated to the mid-19th century advent of steam-powered presses, paper mass-produced from wood pulp and a revenue model based on consumer advertising.
MEDIA

Media: Getting it wrong in Boston

On the warm, clear morning of 9/11, with the towers still ablaze, a workmate and I set out on foot from our office in midtown Manhattan toward what later became known as Ground Zero. This was years before smart phones. With electricity out in much of the downtown, people we passed had turned to a decades-old news source: They huddled around the open doors of parked cars and listened to the radios.
NEWS MEDIA

Privacy invasion requires a good reason

Just how private is the closed-door talk of the powerful? And if the unguarded comments of politicians who assume they’re speaking in confidence are captured on tape, is it OK to make those tapes public?
NEWSPAPERS

Two cheers for the news ombudsman

Word that The Washington Post was doing away with the job of ombudsman after 43 years was greeted, by and large, with a shrug and a yawn by news habitués.
JOURNALISM

Who pays ‘unpaid’ writers’ bills?

People who make their living by writing for publication had good reason to follow the recent hoo-hah over publishers who think paying writers for their work is optional.
WIKILEAKS

Media throw Pvt. Manning to the wolves

In media mythology, the years from the mid-1960s to the mid-’70s were the classical age, a heroic time of moral clarity.