NewsTrust - Blog Archive

Global Economy | Share Your Picks

Last week, our featured topic was the Global Economy. As the global economic recession deepens, world leaders are facing many complex issues, to be discussed at the G20 Summit in April. In this News Hunt, our reviewers looked at the effects of the crisis on people across the world, and examined how President Barack Obama's administration and other governments plan to speed up recovery.

Our top news story was 'Dollar crisis in the making', Asia Times' third installment in a three-part series on China's moves to protect itself amid downturn in Western markets. Our top opinion, 'To save the economy, we need to stop saving' from Newsweek, argued that in order for the U.S. economy to rebound, Americans must stop hoarding and take more risks.

We reviewed 62 stories on the Global Economy throughout the week. Here is a sampling of the best news and opinion we found together:

News

Dollar crisis in the making, part 3
Asia Times
Scenes from the recession
Boston Globe
A world of trouble
GlobalPost
Finance minister gather ahead of G20 summit in April
Economist
UBS: A Swiss bank's shadowy operations
Newsweek

Opinion

To save the economy, we need to stop saving
Newsweek
The big takeover
Rolling Stone
The revenge of Karl Marx
Atlantic Monthly
The ongoing problems of 'stimulust'
Foreign Policy
An unprecedented abyss of economic and social turmoil
Bill Moyers Journal, PBS

The Global Economy: Most trusted stories (full listing)
The Global Economy: Most recent stories ( full listing)

Share Your Picks
This week, we're launching some cool new features to enhance your experience on NewsTrust: the 'Like' link and the 'Picks' list. Now you can select stories you like, and show them as 'Picks' on your profile page. To add a story to your 'Picks,' click the 'Like' link for that story. To view your Picks, click the 'Picks' tab in your member profile. To view another member's Picks, click the same tab in his or her member profile. To remove a story from your Picks, click on its 'Unlike' link. Once you've added stories to your Picks, you can share them with your community via RSS -- or in your own widget. Read more about these features on our separate blog post.

We'd like your feedback
This year, we've been working to improve the NewsTrust experience for all our members and visitors. And as our site evolves, we're seeking your insights, comments and criticisms. Below are some experiments we're considering for the coming weeks -- check them out and tell us which interest you!

Here are some ideas for your consideration:

• Community Picks – Earlier this month, we departed from our tradition of doing a News Hunt on a specific topic, and focused instead on the great news an opinion surfaced by our community. Next week we're planning to leave the featured topic open again -- with the goal of finding some of the best journalism on the Web on any topic. This will be a good opportunity to feature some of your Picks, as described above. See our full blog post about our new 'Like' link and 'Picks' tab for more.

• Bad Journalism – To promote the news literacy mission of NewsTrust, we'd like to contrast our best stories with our worst stories, as rated by our community. Though in the past, we've primarily used NewsTrust review tools to surface good journalism, they can also identify bad journalism - stories that are the inaccurate, unfair, superficial, or plain misinformation. By contrasting some of these problematic stories against quality journalism, we can all become more discerning news consumers.

• Best Video Journalism – Video news stories are becoming increasingly popular, but we don't review them as often as text articles. For this experiment, we would all spend a week honing in on the best video journalism on the Web, on any topic. The same experiment could also be done with audio journalism, either from radio or podcasts.

• Best News Blogs – As blogs continue to change the way we exchange news and information, we want to find some of the best reporting from bloggers. In this News Hunt, we want to focus on the scores of quality news blogs that often slip under our radar (both independent and mainstream).

• Upcoming Topics – We now have the following topics slated for April: Afghanistan, Taxes, Environment and Obama's First 100 Days. Please let us know if you're interested in co-hosting any of these, or if you would like to see another topic featured on NewsTrust.

Which of these ideas appeal to you most? To respond, please leave a comment here on the blog, or share them with our community on our public feedback page, or email us directly at community@newstrust.net with your thoughts.

This Week: Energy
Our featured topic this week is Energy, hosted by Mike LaBonte and Jim Lang. President Barack Obama and his administration are pursuing new energy policies aimed at cutting emissions and developing renewable sources. How are the media covering the dynamic between government and business as these policies are enacted? How will the economic recession affect the creation of new technologies and 'green' jobs? Help us find great journalism on Energy by reviewing a story (or submitting a new story) on our Energy topic page.

-- By Derek Hawkins, with Fabrice Florin and Kaizar Campwala

Share Your Picks

This week, we're launching two new features to make your experience on NewsTrust better: the 'Like' link and the 'Picks' list. Now you can pick stories you like, and show them as 'Picks' on your profile page. To add a story to your 'Picks,' click the 'Like' link for that story, as shown below.

See a good story on NewsTrust you don't have time to review? Click our new 'Like' button below the story's rating icon. This will increase the story's popularity rating and automatically place it in a new 'Picks' tab in your member profile (so you can share it -- or review it later). To remove a story from your Picks, click on its 'Unlike' link.

To view your Picks, click the 'Picks' tab in your member profile. To view another member's Picks, click the same tab in his or her member profile.

Once you've added stories to your Picks, you can share them with your community via RSS -- or in your own widget: 

* RSS: to share your picks via RSS, click on the RSS icon in the Picks tab of your member profile --this will take you to your own Picks feed URL, which you can email to your friends. 

* Widget: to add your picks widget to your own page or website, click on 'Get Widget'  in the Picks tab of your member profile -- and follow the instructions on our widget page.

Note that we also offer other member widgets that list all your recent reviews - or all your reviews with a comment -- on our Widget page.

Next week, we will feature Community Picks from members like you. So be sure to email us when you have a first batch of Picks, so we can promote your selections to the NewsTrust community.

And many thanks to David Fox and Subbu Sastry for their great engineering work in bringing us these new features!

What do you think about our new Picks list? Please leave a comment here on the blog, or share your thoughts with our community on our public feedback page. You're also welcome to email us directly, if you prefer.

The Future of Journalism: Top Stories

The narrative has become familiar to those well beyond the media world: Newspapers -- racked by corporate debt, staff cutbacks, loss of ad revenues and a migration of readers to the Web -- are in decline, and are running out of time to reinvent themselves under a new, sustainable model. For some, it's already too late. On Tuesday, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer published its last print edition, becoming an online-only operation. Weeks earlier, on Feb. 27, Denver's Rocky Mountain News folded entirely. By the end of this week, the Tucson Citizen is expected to stop its presses too. Dozens more are at risk of following similar fates.

News and opinion on the future of the newspaper business -- and journalism as a whole -- have received widespread coverage in light of these and other recent developments. Last week, our community tried to find the best of it. Led by media critic and journalism professor Dan Kennedy, we focused on the Future of Journalism, surfacing dozens of stories on the state of journalism today and what it might look like when the smoke clears.

In this News Hunt, many of the stories focused on the debate over the relevance of traditional media and the new methods and tools taking its place.

Our top rated opinion, however, came from the Daily Show. In 'Brawl Street: Get ready to buy low and sell die!' host John Stewart interviewed CNBC pundit Jim Cramer, berating him for consistently misreporting news on the financial crisis on his show ‘Mad Money.’ As evidence, Stewart used video clips where Cramer contradicted himself or exhibited a conflict of interest. The interview fared very well among our members, and received praise from other news organizations.

On par with Stewart's interview was new media expert Clay Shirky's 'Newspapers and thinking the unthinkable'. In this essay, posted on his blog, Shirky said the debate over how to preserve traditional media had "degenerated into the enthusiastic grasping at straws, pursued by skeptical responses." Shirky continued:

Round and round this goes, with the people committed to saving newspapers demanding to know ”If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?” To which the answer is often: Nothing. Nothing will work. There is no general model for newspapers to replace the one the internet just broke.

With the old economics destroyed, organizational forms perfected for industrial production have to be replaced with structures optimized for digital data. Many observers think it makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves — the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public — has stopped being a problem.

Others weighed in on the fate of traditional media and new possibilities for news consumption. Alan Mutter, of Reflections of a Newsosaur, warned against donating to prop up an ailing local paper. Jeff Jarvis praised the Guardian's decision to make its content available for free to other sites and applications through the use of application programming interfaces (API). And Poynter Institute ran a highly rated interview with former Washington Post editor Jim Brady, who encouraged news sites to be more experimental.

Almost appropriately, our top rated news story was the Project for Excellence in Journalism's annual 'State of the News Media 2009' report. Among its key findings were that Web readership accelerated substantially in 2008, but economic recession and a failure to develop new revenue sources continued to sap newspapers' finances. The report also suggested that many of the new financial models newspapers have pursued are less promising than other less examined models.

In another study-driven story, Pew Research looked at public opinion of local press, reporting that 43 percent of Americans say civic life in their communities would be hurt "a lot" by the loss of a local newspaper. In his review of the story, Dan Kennedy said this "deterioration of the community" was the largest issue facing news organizations. "Successful news orgs must not only serve the community, but foster it as well," he said.

New York Magazine reported on Columbia Journalism School's efforts to transition away from traditional news training toward a more digitally focused curriculum, while National Public Radio asked 'Where were the media as Wall Street imploded?' in a news analysis. The New York Times ran a well-received but generic story on the collapse of the newspaper business, citing the fall of the Rocky Mountain News and others.

Here's a sampling of our top news and opinion on the Future of Journalism:

News

The State of the News Media 2009
Journalism.org
For papers, a downsizing trickle becomes a flood
New York Times
Many would shrug if their local newspaper closed
Pew Research
Columbia J-school's existential crisis
New York Magazine
Where were the media as Wall Street imploded?
National Public Radio

Opinion

Brawl Street: Get ready to buy low and sell die!
Daily Show
Newspapers and thinking the unthinkable
Clay Shirky
Ex-WaPo editor Jim Brady to news sites: Experiment more, now
Poynter Institute
Preaching Ethics, D.C. pol threatens to squash tiny paper
Washington Post
Life, online, after the Rocky Mountain News
Online Journalism Review
The Sarcastic Times
Columbia Journalism Review
Defogging the economic crisis
American Journalism Review
APIs: The new distribution
Buzzmachine
Want to save your local paper? Read this first
Reflections of a Newsosaur

The Future of Journalism: Most trusted stories (full listing)
The Future of Journalism: Most recent stories (full listing)

Thanks to our host, Dan Kennedy!
We'd like to give our host for this News Hunt, Dan Kennedy, a special thanks for reviewing so diligently and astutely, and lending his expertise on this timely and important topic. Dan is a journalism professor at Northeastern University, a longtime media critic and columnist for the Guardian, and a NewsTrust editor. We're very grateful for his outstanding contributions this week, including great story submissions, thoughtful reviews, combined with his daily email reminders and blog posts. Thanks, Dan, for your insights, which are an inspiration to us all.

 

Check our New Widgets
We've just launched some very cool NewsTrust widgets to add to your site or web page. We now offer member widgets to share your latest reviews on your site -- as well as source widgets to track your favorite sources -- in addition to our current topic widgets. For more info, or to quickly create your own custom widget, visit our widget page.

Get You Own Member Widget
Want to share your reviews with the rest of the world? Our new member widgets now let you quickly publish your latest reviews on your site -- or track the reviews of your most trusted NewsTrust reviewers. It only takes about a minute to install your widget on your own web page or site, so give it a try right here.

Track your Favorite Sources
Want to follow NewsTrust rated stories from your favorite source? Our source widgets offer an easy way to track our members' reviews of publications you trust -- from your own site. Are you an editor or journalist at a publication reviewed on NewsTrust? Feature your best work on your own site, using our 'Most Trusted' source widget. Visit our widget page to find out more.

This Week: Global Economy
Our featured topic this week is the Global Economy. As world leaders struggle to address the global economic crisis, how can they reconcile their competing interests to speed up recovery? How do President Barack Obama and his new administration plan to approach the upcoming G20 talks? Meanwhile, what are world governments doing to ease the effects of unemployment, inflation and debt on their citizens? Join this News Hunt on the Global Economy by reviewing a story, submitting a new story or visiting our Global Economy topic page.

By Derek Hawkins, with Fabrice Florin and Kaizar Campwala

Community Picks: Top Stories

NewsTrust is a site for and by its community, and we love nothing more than to promote stories submitted and rated by our citizen reviewers. Last week we departed from our tradition of doing a News Hunt on a particular topic, and instead focused on the great journalism surfaced by our community. Our goal was to look at what our members found to be the week's best stories on the Web, for all topics. We rated a total of 76 stories -- 53 news and 23 opinion -- from a balanced assortment of mainstream and independent sources.

In a week that was somewhat slow for national news, most of our top news stories were special reports and analysis. Many dealt with issues directly related to the economic recession, while others covered topics less prominent in daily news. Our top opinion was even broader in its scope of topics -- too broad to make any generalizations based on what our community submitted. Still, our members posted several highly rated opinions that were more than just punditry.

Below is a sampling of our top community picks -- each of the following was reviewed by at least five of our trusted members:

News

• How could 9,000 business reporters blow it? – The top rated news story of the week, from Mother Jones: A former Wall Street Journal writer's assessment of how a combination of forces and interests led the financial media to under-report or ignore developments that eventually led to last fall's economic crisis. Patricia L'Herrou called it "a very good, comprehensive summary with many facts and figures to illustrate and explain why and how this world's economic crisis was almost overlooked."
• Canadian oil sands – National Geographic offers a vivid report on the environmental, economic and personal impact of mining Alberta's bitumen-laced sands. 
• All boarded up -- How Cleveland is dealing with mass housing foreclosure – A New York Times Magazine piece, this special report looks at the housing crisis in Cleveland. It highlights the actions of a city councilor and other concerned citizens who are grappling with the foreclosure of some 10,000 homes over two years.
• Dealing with Hamas: Can the U.S. avoid it much longer? – Time's Tony Karon suggests that it may be time for the Obama Administration to engage Hamas in Middle East peacemaking measures.
• Wall street on the Tundra – A special report from Vanity Fair on Iceland's economic ruin. 
• Cash Bar – Dahlia Lithwick's biting analysis of a case before the U.S. Supreme Court involving judicial bias.

Opinion

• Jon Stewart rips into CNBC – Top rated opinion of the week, from Comedy Central: The Daily Show's John Stewart pulls from more than two years worth of CNBC financial reporting to show that the networks pundits were repeatedly wrong in their predictions about the economic crisis. "John Stewart is the best media critic in the country," said Dan Kennedy in his review.
• Iran, the Jews and Germany – New York Times columnist Roger Cohen faults his critics for what he calls "caricatures" of Iranian society and government. 
• Zero tolerance now – In Israel's Haaretz, two American NGO directors oppose settlement expansion in the West Bank. 
• One in 31 U.S. adults are behind bars, on parole or probation – Writers from Pew Research recommend new approaches to criminal corrections that could help reduce the country's massive prison population.

Top rated news (full listing)
Top rated opinion (full listing)

For this community picks segment, we called on our members to submit stories they thought deserved to be featured on NewsTrust. Many of them stepped up to the plate with five or more submissions. Special thanks goes out to Dwight Rousu, Patricia Blochowiak, Dan Kennedy, Peter Combs, Patricia L'Herrou and Peter Barnett for submitting so actively.

This week: Journalism, with Dan Kennedy
This week, we're focusing on the Future of Journalism. How will news organizations evolve, in light of recent newspaper shutdowns, newsroom cutbacks, the rise of opinion news and amateur journalism? What are the news media doing to engage a new generation of readers through social networks and other online tools? What innovations in new media are pushing the envelope and changing how we consume news? Leading us in this News Hunt is NewsTrust editor and Northeastern University journalism professor Dan Kennedy. Help us find great news and opinion on the future of journalism by submitting a story on journalism, or visiting our Journalism Topic Page.

The Black Experience: Top Stories

How has the election of Barack Obama changed the public dialogue about race and the realities for African Americans and other people of color?

In honor of Black History Month, NewsTrust teamed up with PBS Engage, PBS’s Tavis Smiley and Santa Clara University students to focus on the Black Experience in America. All last week, we sought out the best journalism on issues of economic empowerment, social justice, and the contributions of African Americans to the country’s cultural landscape. In our final tally, we reviewed 84 stories on the Black Experience from dozens of mainstream and independent publications.

Our top rated story was 'The Other Black President,' a profile of the NAACP's new 35-year-old president, focusing on the challenge of keeping his organization relevant in the era of Barack Obama. The story appeared in the monthly magazine American Prospect and drew high marks from several members, including two of our partner bloggers from PBS. Sean Nixon called it a "very well written thorough analysis of the NAACP. The author takes adequate time to relay the organization’s history, its challenges, and introduce the new NAACP president Ben Jealous." Tamika Thompson praised it for "using Jealous to situate the NAACP in a 21st Century context."

'The Year in Hate,' published by the Southern Poverty Law Center, reported on the gamut of hate groups operating in the United States. It detailed the activity of the three most dangerous factions of white supremacists, and warned that Obama's election, the economic recession and the immigration debate had renewed their energy.

Other top news stories covered a sampling of issues involving race relations and the status of blacks in America. The Washington Post reported that in the first month of Obama's presidency, top government officials have begun to address race "more freely, with a boldness and confidence they once shunned." The article cited several administration officials, including the EPA administrator and Attorney General Eric Holder, who have recently discussed race in public appearances.

Striking a cultural tone, Ebony Magazine's 'Letter from Atlanta' depicted the Georgia capital as "a scale model of black America with all of our glories, vanities, contradictions and failures." And in 'Saga of NFL's African-American pioneers is an untold story,' the Dallas Morning News explained the reintegration of black football players and their coaches in the early days of the NFL.

In our top opinion, The Root, an online magazine not previously listed in our source database, posted two highly rated stories. The first, 'More than beads, booze and boobs,' acknowledged the 100th anniversary of the Zulu krewe parade in New Orleans, which began as a celebration for blacks who were excluded from Mardi Gras. The second, 'Approaching the whites-only bench,'called attention to the lack of diversity among American judges and argued that a "systematic approach" is needed to make courts more representative of their constituencies.

Top Stories on the Black Experience
Here is a list of our top news and opinion on the Black Experience:

News

The Other Black President
American Prospect
The Year in Hate
Southern Poverty Law Center
Saga of NFL's African-American pioneers is an untold story
Dallas Morning News
Top officials expand dialogue on race
Washington Post
Letter from Atlanta
Ebony

Opinion

Race and the stimulus rejectionists
Salon
More than beads, booze and boobs
The Root
Approaching the whites-only bench
The Root
New eyes on bigger prizes
Washington Post
On different pages when it comes to race
Chicago Tribune

Most trusted: top rated stories on the Black Experience (full list ranked by rating)

Most recent: top stories on the Black Experience (full list ranked by date)

Thanks to our partners
We'd like to extend a warm thanks to our partners from the Tavis Smiley team, PBS Engage,and Santa Clara University, who contributed so much to this project last week. Tavis Smiley's Young Voices bloggers Tamika Thompson, Sean Nixon and Jeremy Freed posted a total 47 story reviews and offered some great notes to back up their ratings. SCU professor Lehrman and her students also came together to submit 33 reviews on our Black Experience stories. And thank you to the folks who helped organize this News Hunt in the first place: Laura Hertzfeld, Jayme Swain, Kevin Dando and Amy Baroch from PBS Engage; and Philip Dunn and Ariel Fox of KCET.

From the NewsTrust community, we'd also like to recognize the great reviews and submissions from our most active members: Kristin Gorski, Dale Penn, Dwight Rousu, Patricia Blochowiak, Kenneth Sibbett, Kevin Barry and Peter Combs. We enjoyed working with you again, and your participation is an inspiration to us.

This Week: Community Picks
This week on NewsTrust, we invite you to submit a story for review. Have you come across a good news story today? If so, please share it with us. Pick a story -- on any topic -- that you think deserves to be reviewed and post it here. Can you help us rate this week's best stories? Please review some of the stories dug up by your peers, to help us determine which community picks to feature on our home page. We're particularly interested in your reviews on unrated stories (indicated by a gray icon), in our Stories for Review listing.

-- By Derek Hawkins, with Kaizar Campwala and Fabrice Florin

This Week: Community Picks

This week on NewsTrust, we're departing from our tradition of hosting a News Hunt on a featured topic, and focusing instead on the great journalism surfaced by our community, on any topic. We're looking for the best news and opinion you find on the Web, with a focus on reviews and submissions from new members. Our goal is to find what emerges from our own interests, and feature stories that our members rate most highly – or that generate the most reviews.

Review a Story Today
Can you help us rate this week's best stories? Please review some of the stories dug up by your peers, to help us determine which community picks to feature on our home page. We're particularly interested in your reviews on unrated stories (indicated by a gray icon), in our Stories for Review listing.

Share Your Favorite News
Have you come across an excellent news story recently? If so, please share it with us -- and submit it on NewsTrust, using our simple submission tool.

Throughout the week, we will feature your community picks for the week's best journalism on the NewsTrust home page. Next week, we'll list the week’s community picks on our blog, along with our analysis.

First Community Pick
Our first community pick of the week, FactCheck's 'Doctor's Orders,' caps off a three week debate over a controversial op-ed by Betsy McCaughey, former Republican lieutenant governor of New York, which appeared in Bloomberg News Feb. 9. Several NewsTrust editors vetted the piece and were among those who petitioned FactCheck to publish its own analysis, which concluded that the Bloomberg opinion piece contained falsehoods.

McCaughey's op-ed, 'Ruin your health with the Obama stimulus plan', warned that the Obama Administration's stimulus bill would allow a dangerous expansion of the government's role in monitoring and providing health care, and put doctor-patient relationships at risk. "[T]he bill treats health care the way European governments do: as a cost problem instead of a growth industry," she wrote. "Imagine limiting growth and innovation in the electronics or auto industry during this downturn. This stimulus is dangerous to your health and the economy."

The claim raised questions among many readers, including of our editors, who took issue with the way McCaughey cited evidence and interpreted key provisions of the bill. Several members of our team took it upon themselves to investigate her arguments. Walter Cox emailed McCaughey directly asking for more information on the passages of the bill she used in her critique. He joined Mike LaBonte, Beth Wellington, Marsha Iverson, Dan Kennedy, Jim Lang and Dale Penn in scrutinizing McCaughey's citations and seeking outside perspectives to compare to her conclusions.

Their work brought a host of new information to light and helped us arrive at a consensus on McCaughey's piece. We found that McCaughey had indeed exaggerated many of the claims in her op-ed. We endorse FactCheck's analysis as fair, factual and accurate.

At issue were her assertions that Obama's bill would create a "new bureaucracy, the National Coordinator of Health Information Technology." The office, she wrote, would allow the government to interfere with doctors' decisions, "ration" health care to seniors, and screen treatments for cost effectiveness. In fact, the office was created in 2004 under George W. Bush; Obama's bill only called for funding for the office. The bill, now law, did not call for any "rationing" and contained no language about monitoring for "cost effectiveness."

McCaughey and Bloomberg News were also remiss in disclosing relevant background about McCaughey and her affiliations. McCaughey is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, a conservative interest group whose funders include several major pharmaceutical companies. Furthermore, in 1994 McCaughey criticized then President Bill Clinton's health care initiative in an article in the New Republic, for which she received the National Magazine Award for public interest. Much of the article was later debunked, prompting an apology and a retraction from the magazine. This constituted a conflict of interest that the author and the news organization should have made clear up front.

Walter Cox spoke at length with McCaughey, and adjusted his original review of her piece. Here is his reaction to their conversation:

I wish to acknowledge that various editors and reviewers at NewsTrust were correct that McCaughey’s concerns were overstated.  It is not clear to me, however, that she was guilty of intellectual dishonesty when she penned her opinion piece.

I interviewed Betsy McCaughey on February 19, 2009, and she spent a full hour going over specific points of her Bloomberg piece.  What became immediately clear is that  McCaughey is no Republican hack intent on sabotaging the Obama initiative to create a national healthcare system.  In fact she is a registered Democrat who supported Obama’s run for the presidency and voted for him in the national election. She also is in favor of creating a national healthcare system, perhaps one modeled on the WHO-acclaimed French version.  I am convinced that the concerns she voiced in the Bloomberg piece were sincere and were informed by experience garnered during the 1990’s serving as Lieutenant Governor of the State of New York (she was a Republican at that time).  Specifically her sensibilities revolve around New York’s battle to outlaw what are called “withholds” in the health insurance industry.   What she noticed in the House version of the stimulus bill was language that closely resembles the language insurance companies traditionally use to penalize physicians who do not toe their line when it comes to their recommended patient treatment protocols.

Nevertheless, McCaughey clearly overstated her case in the Bloomberg piece.  She claimed a relationship between the language of the bill and direct government interference in the physician/patient relationship, when in fact such interference is but a distant possibility.   In the end some good came out of her efforts, because the final version of the bill contains safeguards that did not exist in the original House version; those safeguards would not have been added had she not pointed out potential dangers inherent in the bill’s original language.  In my opinion her distortions were not necessary in order to accomplish this good, and her loss of credibility following publication of the Bloomberg piece has been well earned.

Mike LaBonte remarked on the value of evaluating a story as controversial as this one, especially when it could have a far reaching impact.

A lot of digging has taken place around this story. We read bills and articles, and Walter took the initiative to interview a key player. The question that comes to my mind is "What does it mean for NewsTrust?"  A controversial issue came up, we tried to find the best journalism on the subject, and in the end the truth fell somewhere in the middle.

If you like this first community pick, help us find another by reviewing and submitting quality journalism this week.

Join Our Search
Can you help us find some of the best news and opinion on the Web this week? To get started, be sure to Log In (if you’re already a member) or Sign Up (if you’re not a member yet). Then dive right in, and review some of the unrated stories submitted by other members like you.

And if you’ve come across a great article lately, be sure to share it with us by clicking on the ‘Submit’ button at the top right corner of any page on our site.

-- By Derek Hawkins, with Fabrice Florin and Kaizar Campwala