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The remarks from the reviews of Family of Secrets reflect more positively on the book then was actually the case. Seems the reviews were somewhat cherry picked to take the best remarks and leave out the criticism (of which there was a good bit). -- UhOhFeeling ( talk) 20:25, 29 October 2010 (UTC)
I would like to respectfully disagree; the article clearly states that the book was criticized by reviewers in several major, established media sources, including The Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post. Had the author neglected to mention these, I would agree that the article is distorted, but I don't see how the piece could be viewed as biased since it openly acknowledges the criticism.Lisamosc 04:15, 6 February 2011 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Lisamosc ( talk • contribs)
It would be helpful if those concerned about NPOV could identify negative reviews or published criticisms that have not been cited in the article. I found one
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2010/071110b.html but this seems to be a case of praising with faint damnation, as the criticism is that so many other unsavory matters are lightly skimmed or left out. (Put more positively, this could be a proposal that the book be one volume of Encyclopedia Bushiana. Or conversely, as old Ben Johnson said of Milton's Paradise Lost, "One would not wish the moon any fuller.")
Bn (
talk) 02:48, 14 March 2013 (UTC)
I believe I have addressed the outstanding NPOV issues. In copy editing I rephrased passages that had a promotional feel. I left just one official link to each of his two websites, and those are in the infobox, not in the body of the article. I moved all other external links to references, except for four additional links to familyofsecrets.com which are in the Media section for mp3 files of recorded interviews. If I see no objection over the next few days I will remove 2010 POV-section tag and the 2011 Advert tag.
Bn (
talk) 19:56, 14 March 2013 (UTC)
Seeing no objection, I am now removing the 2010 POV-section tag and the 2011 Advert tag.
Bn (
talk) 13:31, 19 March 2013 (UTC)
For ease of access to the record, the date of the former was October 2010 and that of the latter May 2011. (And I learned that you can't just comment them out. :-)
Bn (
talk) 13:37, 19 March 2013 (UTC)
I propose that WhoWhatWhy, which lacks coverage in reliable secondary sources, merge to Russ Baker. Please discuss. - Location ( talk) 02:43, 14 May 2015 (UTC)
Hello fellow Wikipedians,
I have just added archive links to one external link on
Russ Baker. Please take a moment to review
my edit. If necessary, add {{
cbignore}}
after the link to keep me from modifying it. Alternatively, you can add {{
nobots|deny=InternetArchiveBot}}
to keep me off the page altogether. I made the following changes:
Cheers.— cyberbot II Talk to my owner:Online 16:00, 13 July 2015 (UTC)
In my interactions with two editors on the three related pages mentioned above ( WhoWhatWhy, Family of Secrets, & Russ Baker) they have repeatedly assumed bad faith on my part. Each has separately asked if I have a conflict of interest. (I do not.) Their misperception of my motives may have begun when, in response to a notability challenge and RFD, I began inserting text with citations of what I took to be RS references, assuming this was what was called for. These were immediately reverted as puffery. Since then, my every edit has been perceived in that light. As an alternative to incipient edit warring, for which I have neither time nor inclination, this is an appeal for help from other editors for a more constructive approach. The articles have withstood the notability challenge. Let's improve them.
Recent edits illustrate their presumption of bad faith. A couple of examples will illustrate.
In a RS, I found a quotation of Judith Regan speaking to the RS reporter at an event celebrating publication of the book. Regan was obviously referring to Baker, who was speaking at the event, and who (the RS quotes her as saying) she was interviewing about the book the following day on her radio show. The quotation ended with this sentence describing him:
"It’s very hard to find people who do real investigative reporting anymore, and it’s these lone guys who don’t have any ax to grind, they’re not serving any corporate agenda, they’re not serving anything but their own reporting."(A footnote cites the RS.)
This was removed from the quotation, with the edit comment "Far too long and puffy, removing per NPOV; the first sentence makes the point fine)". (A later comment describes this sentence as "ridiculously puffy".)
"Puffy" I understand as an appeal to WP:LARD. A straightforward read of this essay (it is not a guideline or policy) tells me that the editor presumes that my motivation for including this sentence was to exaggerate the notability of the subject so as to avoid deletion of the article.
The first sentence that was found unobjectionable because it "makes the point [just] fine" is:
'Asked about the challenges the book faced in mainstream media, Judith Regan, the editor, producer, book publisher and television and radio talk show host, said that "the forces of the corporate-owned media are so powerful that a voice like this is hard to be heard because all they do is marginalize you and demonize you and defame you.'
This first sentence makes a different point. It's in response to the reporter's question "how, if you’re sitting on some volatile piece of information that no one else has really documented before, do you convince people not to dismiss you as a lunatic?" This refers to the information in the book and difficulties getting it neutrally reviewed. She elaborated this point further, based (as she says) on personal experience. (For the experience that she probably was referring to, see Judith_Regan#Career, third to last paragraph).
A more constructive approach might be to move the quote that refers more to the author as an investigative reporter out of the section about the book to another part of the article about the author. Given the combative attitude of these two editors, I feel disempowered to attempt this.
One of the editors then reduced the description of Ms. Regan to "Judith Regan, the former publisher". This was her then status in 2009, as stated in the RS. The deleted description of her actual current status was taken from the article Judith Regan. This shoot-from-the-hip editing is not constructive.
Subsequently, even this "just fine" sentence was removed by the other member of this tag team of editors, with a comment describing it as a "self-serving quote from publicist". I reverted the rm, with the comment "A journalist (not publicist) is quoted by another journalist in a RS. Cannot be claimed to be self-serving. JDL?" It was removed again with the comment "text mischaracterizes the source. Regan was making a general comment, not on the book, which she hadn't read)". Be it noted, the RS says Baker was going on her radio show the next day. It is not credible to propose that Regan, as an experienced interviewer, did not receive & read an advance copy. The context is an event about the book. The objection strains credulity. One may also ask how it is self-serving. It doesn't serve me. It may serve Baker, but he's not writing the article. Perhaps this is a veiled charge of COI.
Another example.
On 11 March, I inserted this from a Boston.com article about Russ Baker: Former CBS News anchor Dan Rather has said “He’s an indefatigable reporter who has made a specialty of digging deep into stories when most other people have left the story. And he’s very good at raising the right questions.” One of the editors deleted this with the comment "blatant cherry-picking".
The other replaced it with the following: In a January 2015 profile, Boston magazine said that over the past decade, "Baker has abandoned the mainstream media and become a key player on the fringe, walking that murky line between conventional investigative journalist and wild-eyed conspiracy theorist." The edit comment: "more representative quote".
On 24 July, I looked at the article again, and inserted the following in an inappropriate location, as a blockquote in the lead. My edit comment was "Putting quotation back in context".
In a January 2015 profile, Boston magazine said Over the past decade, however, Baker has abandoned the mainstream media and become a key player on the fringe, walking that murky line between conventional investigative journalist and wild-eyed conspiracy theorist. … It would be a lot easier to dismiss Baker as a nut and move on if it weren’t for his three decades of award-winning investigative-reporting experience. … Baker is a journalist, and to hear a lot of people tell it, he’s a damn good one. “He’s an indefatigable reporter who has made a specialty of digging deep into stories when most other people have left the story,” former CBS News anchor Dan Rather tells me later. “And he’s very good at raising the right questions.”
This was moved (as it needed to be). The context was also deleted, reducing it to the original negative quotation:
In a January 2015 profile, Boston magazine said that over the past decade, "Baker has abandoned the mainstream media and become a key player on the fringe, walking that murky line between conventional investigative journalist and wild-eyed conspiracy theorist."
The edit comment was "inappropriate to have blockquote in lead section, ditto other text, which is self-serving puffery". Again, I must ask how it is self-serving, unless the claim is that Baker or his employee is writing it.
With the edit comment that the rm was cherry-picking a negative statement out of a generally positive article, I restored a part of the context as follows: In a January 2015 profile, Boston magazine said that over the past decade "Baker has abandoned the mainstream media and become a key player on the fringe, walking that murky line between conventional investigative journalist and wild-eyed conspiracy theorist. … It would be a lot easier to dismiss Baker as a nut and move on if it weren’t for his three decades of award-winning investigative-reporting experience."
This entire quotation was removed, both the negative statement and its context, with the unintelligible one-word edit comment "let".
I have looked at the article on occasion (e.g. November, January, March, and July), when I have time and inclination. The immediacy with which these two editors respond to revert any changes I make suggest that they have made something of a project of it. They have asked me if I have a conflict of interest. [1]
Help is needed from editors who can demonstrate NPOV. For the present, I will not edit these three articles further, confining my activities to this talk page. This experience is discouraging me from editing Wikipedia at all. Bn ( talk) 23:42, 27 July 2015 (UTC)
Removed POV and Notability tags, which were introduced without response to discussion here. CJR is RS; adding appropriate citations. Bn ( talk) 21:57, 5 July 2016 (UTC)
Cited sources are not closely associated with Baker, and additional citations have been provided, so I am removing the remaining tags. Bn ( talk) 03:08, 6 July 2016 (UTC)
This refers to the deletion at 17:13, 6 July 2016.
Since this article is not about Politico, WP:ABOUTSELF does not apply. Even if it did apply, what WP:ABOUTSELF says is that self-published and questionable sources in fact may be used (with specified exceptions that have not been invoked here).
Politico.com is not WP:QS, which "have a poor reputation for checking the facts, lack meaningful editorial oversight, or have an apparent conflict of interest".
I agree that additional sourcing for the three awards would be good. SPJ and Common Cause give many awards (e.g. http://www.spj.org/awards.asp). I have not yet found a Mencken award for journalism. However, the desirability of more RS is not grounds for deleting the text.
Consequently, I have reverted the deletion, adding {{cn}} on each award. Bn ( talk) 00:10, 7 July 2016 (UTC)
Well, I see that the Mencken and Common Cause awards mentioned in Politico and elsewhere are not in the article. Tag the SPJ award mention with {{Additional citation needed}} if necessary, but deletion is unjustified. Bn ( talk) 00:27, 7 July 2016 (UTC)
The request for RS documentation of degrees at 17:03, 6 July 2016 is truly excessive nitpicking. Note that none of the entries at List of Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism people are footnoted to RS. Readers of the article will not be served. I will find the RS references and post them here to satisfy User:DrFleischman, and am removing the {{cn}} tags. Bn ( talk) 11:47, 7 July 2016 (UTC)
UCLA Yearbook for 1979, p. 173.
I will be happy to summarize in the manner of the Bernstein page, e.g.
Following Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in 1990, Bernstein went to Iraq to cover the events for Time magazine. In a special report several weeks before the Gulf War began, Bernstein revealed the discontent and hatred felt against Saddam Hussein by many in Iraq. He was subsequently expelled from the country and flown out to Egypt.
etc., that is without citations referencing the specific article or articles that are summarized. Please let me know now if you have an objection to that resolution. Bn ( talk) 18:31, 11 July 2016 (UTC)
Can anyone find any independent confirmation that Baker was on the adjunct faculty at the Columbia Journalism School, as stated by the cited source written by Baker? I'm concerned because I could find nothing, and I'm surprised this wasn't mentioned in the in-depth profile that was recently published by the Columbia Journalism Review. And if we can't find independent confirmation, does this impugn the reliability of the cited source? I'm on the fence. -- Dr. Fleischman ( talk) 17:20, 13 July 2016 (UTC)
Bn, I think something is a little mixed up with the SPJ/Deadline club awards. Our article said Baker got an SPJ award for a story about Dan Burton published in 1998, but the sources you added say he got a Deadline Club award for a story about Bush's National Guard experience published in 2004. Something's not right. Perhaps you can clear this up? -- Dr. Fleischman ( talk) 16:50, 14 July 2016 (UTC)
Does anyone know what Baker wrote for the Washington Post? I couldn't find it anywhere. -- Dr. Fleischman ( talk) 21:58, 14 July 2016 (UTC)
I recently read this for the first time and it read like something that emerges from a fraught NPOV debate between camps of people with divergent biases over the subject. I'm editing this anonymously because it seems likely that there are political grudges involved and I don't want to be followed around the internet by folks who spend their time engaging in them. I think this article would be improved a lot if it were edited exclusively by a new set of editors, including none that have patterns of political NPOV mud-wresting in either direction.
Some parts of the previous draft were egregiously slanted against the subject (perhaps over-correcting for some long-buried earlier drafts?), including a book review paragraph that quoted extensively from one single 'scathing' review, while leaving out much more balanced remarks, including from the very references cited. If you read them all, the reviews are clearly "mixed" - maybe 5 out of 10 on average, or lower if you weight the popular broadsheets higher. But the guy's whole standpoint is critiquing their worldview, so it really isn't NPOV just to quote exclusively from the set of sources he's apparently spent his career opposing.
I haven't gone through any of the other sections but I hope somebody else does. 96.224.245.189 ( talk) 03:42, 12 October 2021 (UTC)
Russ Baker has argued on his website (and presumably as the IP in the previous section) that Wikipedia editors have cherry-picked sources to negatively describe his journalistic approach and his book Family of Secrets. I have opened a discussion at Wikipedia:Neutral point of view/Noticeboard#Russ Baker to address these complaints. - Location ( talk) 16:55, 7 March 2023 (UTC)
For future reference:
This article is similar to the Boston Magazine article in that there are various quotes suggesting that mainstream outlets tend to be fearful of working with Baker because they are profit driven and don't want to rock the boat... versus possessing standards that exception claims require exceptional evidence. - Location ( talk) 19:40, 11 March 2023 (UTC)
For future reference:
This is the article for which Baker won the 2005 Deadline Club Award. The Deadline Club appears to be part of the Society of Professional Journalists' New York City chapter. Here is their article that states he received the award for Web News Exclusive:
{{
cite news}}
: |archive-date=
/ |archive-url=
timestamp mismatch; April 20, 2006 suggested (
help)The judges comments state: "Russ Baker’s 'Why Bush Left Texas' questioned a sitting President’s version of details he had successfully brushed aside for years: whether he actually fulfilled his National Guard commitment. Baker’s broadly-sourced article brought some clarity to a muddy issue and drove debate on a critical topic at a critical time: amid the heat of a Presidential campaign. The story’s essay style fits well on the internet." - Location ( talk) 20:11, 11 March 2023 (UTC)
The following Wikipedia contributor may be personally or professionally connected to the subject of this article. Relevant policies and guidelines may include conflict of interest, autobiography, and neutral point of view. |
This article must adhere to the biographies of living persons (BLP) policy, even if it is not a biography, because it contains material about living persons. Contentious material about living persons that is unsourced or poorly sourced must be removed immediately from the article and its talk page, especially if potentially libellous. If such material is repeatedly inserted, or if you have other concerns, please report the issue to this noticeboard.If you are a subject of this article, or acting on behalf of one, and you need help, please see this help page. |
This article is rated C-class on Wikipedia's
content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects: | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
The remarks from the reviews of Family of Secrets reflect more positively on the book then was actually the case. Seems the reviews were somewhat cherry picked to take the best remarks and leave out the criticism (of which there was a good bit). -- UhOhFeeling ( talk) 20:25, 29 October 2010 (UTC)
I would like to respectfully disagree; the article clearly states that the book was criticized by reviewers in several major, established media sources, including The Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post. Had the author neglected to mention these, I would agree that the article is distorted, but I don't see how the piece could be viewed as biased since it openly acknowledges the criticism.Lisamosc 04:15, 6 February 2011 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Lisamosc ( talk • contribs)
It would be helpful if those concerned about NPOV could identify negative reviews or published criticisms that have not been cited in the article. I found one
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2010/071110b.html but this seems to be a case of praising with faint damnation, as the criticism is that so many other unsavory matters are lightly skimmed or left out. (Put more positively, this could be a proposal that the book be one volume of Encyclopedia Bushiana. Or conversely, as old Ben Johnson said of Milton's Paradise Lost, "One would not wish the moon any fuller.")
Bn (
talk) 02:48, 14 March 2013 (UTC)
I believe I have addressed the outstanding NPOV issues. In copy editing I rephrased passages that had a promotional feel. I left just one official link to each of his two websites, and those are in the infobox, not in the body of the article. I moved all other external links to references, except for four additional links to familyofsecrets.com which are in the Media section for mp3 files of recorded interviews. If I see no objection over the next few days I will remove 2010 POV-section tag and the 2011 Advert tag.
Bn (
talk) 19:56, 14 March 2013 (UTC)
Seeing no objection, I am now removing the 2010 POV-section tag and the 2011 Advert tag.
Bn (
talk) 13:31, 19 March 2013 (UTC)
For ease of access to the record, the date of the former was October 2010 and that of the latter May 2011. (And I learned that you can't just comment them out. :-)
Bn (
talk) 13:37, 19 March 2013 (UTC)
I propose that WhoWhatWhy, which lacks coverage in reliable secondary sources, merge to Russ Baker. Please discuss. - Location ( talk) 02:43, 14 May 2015 (UTC)
Hello fellow Wikipedians,
I have just added archive links to one external link on
Russ Baker. Please take a moment to review
my edit. If necessary, add {{
cbignore}}
after the link to keep me from modifying it. Alternatively, you can add {{
nobots|deny=InternetArchiveBot}}
to keep me off the page altogether. I made the following changes:
Cheers.— cyberbot II Talk to my owner:Online 16:00, 13 July 2015 (UTC)
In my interactions with two editors on the three related pages mentioned above ( WhoWhatWhy, Family of Secrets, & Russ Baker) they have repeatedly assumed bad faith on my part. Each has separately asked if I have a conflict of interest. (I do not.) Their misperception of my motives may have begun when, in response to a notability challenge and RFD, I began inserting text with citations of what I took to be RS references, assuming this was what was called for. These were immediately reverted as puffery. Since then, my every edit has been perceived in that light. As an alternative to incipient edit warring, for which I have neither time nor inclination, this is an appeal for help from other editors for a more constructive approach. The articles have withstood the notability challenge. Let's improve them.
Recent edits illustrate their presumption of bad faith. A couple of examples will illustrate.
In a RS, I found a quotation of Judith Regan speaking to the RS reporter at an event celebrating publication of the book. Regan was obviously referring to Baker, who was speaking at the event, and who (the RS quotes her as saying) she was interviewing about the book the following day on her radio show. The quotation ended with this sentence describing him:
"It’s very hard to find people who do real investigative reporting anymore, and it’s these lone guys who don’t have any ax to grind, they’re not serving any corporate agenda, they’re not serving anything but their own reporting."(A footnote cites the RS.)
This was removed from the quotation, with the edit comment "Far too long and puffy, removing per NPOV; the first sentence makes the point fine)". (A later comment describes this sentence as "ridiculously puffy".)
"Puffy" I understand as an appeal to WP:LARD. A straightforward read of this essay (it is not a guideline or policy) tells me that the editor presumes that my motivation for including this sentence was to exaggerate the notability of the subject so as to avoid deletion of the article.
The first sentence that was found unobjectionable because it "makes the point [just] fine" is:
'Asked about the challenges the book faced in mainstream media, Judith Regan, the editor, producer, book publisher and television and radio talk show host, said that "the forces of the corporate-owned media are so powerful that a voice like this is hard to be heard because all they do is marginalize you and demonize you and defame you.'
This first sentence makes a different point. It's in response to the reporter's question "how, if you’re sitting on some volatile piece of information that no one else has really documented before, do you convince people not to dismiss you as a lunatic?" This refers to the information in the book and difficulties getting it neutrally reviewed. She elaborated this point further, based (as she says) on personal experience. (For the experience that she probably was referring to, see Judith_Regan#Career, third to last paragraph).
A more constructive approach might be to move the quote that refers more to the author as an investigative reporter out of the section about the book to another part of the article about the author. Given the combative attitude of these two editors, I feel disempowered to attempt this.
One of the editors then reduced the description of Ms. Regan to "Judith Regan, the former publisher". This was her then status in 2009, as stated in the RS. The deleted description of her actual current status was taken from the article Judith Regan. This shoot-from-the-hip editing is not constructive.
Subsequently, even this "just fine" sentence was removed by the other member of this tag team of editors, with a comment describing it as a "self-serving quote from publicist". I reverted the rm, with the comment "A journalist (not publicist) is quoted by another journalist in a RS. Cannot be claimed to be self-serving. JDL?" It was removed again with the comment "text mischaracterizes the source. Regan was making a general comment, not on the book, which she hadn't read)". Be it noted, the RS says Baker was going on her radio show the next day. It is not credible to propose that Regan, as an experienced interviewer, did not receive & read an advance copy. The context is an event about the book. The objection strains credulity. One may also ask how it is self-serving. It doesn't serve me. It may serve Baker, but he's not writing the article. Perhaps this is a veiled charge of COI.
Another example.
On 11 March, I inserted this from a Boston.com article about Russ Baker: Former CBS News anchor Dan Rather has said “He’s an indefatigable reporter who has made a specialty of digging deep into stories when most other people have left the story. And he’s very good at raising the right questions.” One of the editors deleted this with the comment "blatant cherry-picking".
The other replaced it with the following: In a January 2015 profile, Boston magazine said that over the past decade, "Baker has abandoned the mainstream media and become a key player on the fringe, walking that murky line between conventional investigative journalist and wild-eyed conspiracy theorist." The edit comment: "more representative quote".
On 24 July, I looked at the article again, and inserted the following in an inappropriate location, as a blockquote in the lead. My edit comment was "Putting quotation back in context".
In a January 2015 profile, Boston magazine said Over the past decade, however, Baker has abandoned the mainstream media and become a key player on the fringe, walking that murky line between conventional investigative journalist and wild-eyed conspiracy theorist. … It would be a lot easier to dismiss Baker as a nut and move on if it weren’t for his three decades of award-winning investigative-reporting experience. … Baker is a journalist, and to hear a lot of people tell it, he’s a damn good one. “He’s an indefatigable reporter who has made a specialty of digging deep into stories when most other people have left the story,” former CBS News anchor Dan Rather tells me later. “And he’s very good at raising the right questions.”
This was moved (as it needed to be). The context was also deleted, reducing it to the original negative quotation:
In a January 2015 profile, Boston magazine said that over the past decade, "Baker has abandoned the mainstream media and become a key player on the fringe, walking that murky line between conventional investigative journalist and wild-eyed conspiracy theorist."
The edit comment was "inappropriate to have blockquote in lead section, ditto other text, which is self-serving puffery". Again, I must ask how it is self-serving, unless the claim is that Baker or his employee is writing it.
With the edit comment that the rm was cherry-picking a negative statement out of a generally positive article, I restored a part of the context as follows: In a January 2015 profile, Boston magazine said that over the past decade "Baker has abandoned the mainstream media and become a key player on the fringe, walking that murky line between conventional investigative journalist and wild-eyed conspiracy theorist. … It would be a lot easier to dismiss Baker as a nut and move on if it weren’t for his three decades of award-winning investigative-reporting experience."
This entire quotation was removed, both the negative statement and its context, with the unintelligible one-word edit comment "let".
I have looked at the article on occasion (e.g. November, January, March, and July), when I have time and inclination. The immediacy with which these two editors respond to revert any changes I make suggest that they have made something of a project of it. They have asked me if I have a conflict of interest. [1]
Help is needed from editors who can demonstrate NPOV. For the present, I will not edit these three articles further, confining my activities to this talk page. This experience is discouraging me from editing Wikipedia at all. Bn ( talk) 23:42, 27 July 2015 (UTC)
Removed POV and Notability tags, which were introduced without response to discussion here. CJR is RS; adding appropriate citations. Bn ( talk) 21:57, 5 July 2016 (UTC)
Cited sources are not closely associated with Baker, and additional citations have been provided, so I am removing the remaining tags. Bn ( talk) 03:08, 6 July 2016 (UTC)
This refers to the deletion at 17:13, 6 July 2016.
Since this article is not about Politico, WP:ABOUTSELF does not apply. Even if it did apply, what WP:ABOUTSELF says is that self-published and questionable sources in fact may be used (with specified exceptions that have not been invoked here).
Politico.com is not WP:QS, which "have a poor reputation for checking the facts, lack meaningful editorial oversight, or have an apparent conflict of interest".
I agree that additional sourcing for the three awards would be good. SPJ and Common Cause give many awards (e.g. http://www.spj.org/awards.asp). I have not yet found a Mencken award for journalism. However, the desirability of more RS is not grounds for deleting the text.
Consequently, I have reverted the deletion, adding {{cn}} on each award. Bn ( talk) 00:10, 7 July 2016 (UTC)
Well, I see that the Mencken and Common Cause awards mentioned in Politico and elsewhere are not in the article. Tag the SPJ award mention with {{Additional citation needed}} if necessary, but deletion is unjustified. Bn ( talk) 00:27, 7 July 2016 (UTC)
The request for RS documentation of degrees at 17:03, 6 July 2016 is truly excessive nitpicking. Note that none of the entries at List of Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism people are footnoted to RS. Readers of the article will not be served. I will find the RS references and post them here to satisfy User:DrFleischman, and am removing the {{cn}} tags. Bn ( talk) 11:47, 7 July 2016 (UTC)
UCLA Yearbook for 1979, p. 173.
I will be happy to summarize in the manner of the Bernstein page, e.g.
Following Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in 1990, Bernstein went to Iraq to cover the events for Time magazine. In a special report several weeks before the Gulf War began, Bernstein revealed the discontent and hatred felt against Saddam Hussein by many in Iraq. He was subsequently expelled from the country and flown out to Egypt.
etc., that is without citations referencing the specific article or articles that are summarized. Please let me know now if you have an objection to that resolution. Bn ( talk) 18:31, 11 July 2016 (UTC)
Can anyone find any independent confirmation that Baker was on the adjunct faculty at the Columbia Journalism School, as stated by the cited source written by Baker? I'm concerned because I could find nothing, and I'm surprised this wasn't mentioned in the in-depth profile that was recently published by the Columbia Journalism Review. And if we can't find independent confirmation, does this impugn the reliability of the cited source? I'm on the fence. -- Dr. Fleischman ( talk) 17:20, 13 July 2016 (UTC)
Bn, I think something is a little mixed up with the SPJ/Deadline club awards. Our article said Baker got an SPJ award for a story about Dan Burton published in 1998, but the sources you added say he got a Deadline Club award for a story about Bush's National Guard experience published in 2004. Something's not right. Perhaps you can clear this up? -- Dr. Fleischman ( talk) 16:50, 14 July 2016 (UTC)
Does anyone know what Baker wrote for the Washington Post? I couldn't find it anywhere. -- Dr. Fleischman ( talk) 21:58, 14 July 2016 (UTC)
I recently read this for the first time and it read like something that emerges from a fraught NPOV debate between camps of people with divergent biases over the subject. I'm editing this anonymously because it seems likely that there are political grudges involved and I don't want to be followed around the internet by folks who spend their time engaging in them. I think this article would be improved a lot if it were edited exclusively by a new set of editors, including none that have patterns of political NPOV mud-wresting in either direction.
Some parts of the previous draft were egregiously slanted against the subject (perhaps over-correcting for some long-buried earlier drafts?), including a book review paragraph that quoted extensively from one single 'scathing' review, while leaving out much more balanced remarks, including from the very references cited. If you read them all, the reviews are clearly "mixed" - maybe 5 out of 10 on average, or lower if you weight the popular broadsheets higher. But the guy's whole standpoint is critiquing their worldview, so it really isn't NPOV just to quote exclusively from the set of sources he's apparently spent his career opposing.
I haven't gone through any of the other sections but I hope somebody else does. 96.224.245.189 ( talk) 03:42, 12 October 2021 (UTC)
Russ Baker has argued on his website (and presumably as the IP in the previous section) that Wikipedia editors have cherry-picked sources to negatively describe his journalistic approach and his book Family of Secrets. I have opened a discussion at Wikipedia:Neutral point of view/Noticeboard#Russ Baker to address these complaints. - Location ( talk) 16:55, 7 March 2023 (UTC)
For future reference:
This article is similar to the Boston Magazine article in that there are various quotes suggesting that mainstream outlets tend to be fearful of working with Baker because they are profit driven and don't want to rock the boat... versus possessing standards that exception claims require exceptional evidence. - Location ( talk) 19:40, 11 March 2023 (UTC)
For future reference:
This is the article for which Baker won the 2005 Deadline Club Award. The Deadline Club appears to be part of the Society of Professional Journalists' New York City chapter. Here is their article that states he received the award for Web News Exclusive:
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timestamp mismatch; April 20, 2006 suggested (
help)The judges comments state: "Russ Baker’s 'Why Bush Left Texas' questioned a sitting President’s version of details he had successfully brushed aside for years: whether he actually fulfilled his National Guard commitment. Baker’s broadly-sourced article brought some clarity to a muddy issue and drove debate on a critical topic at a critical time: amid the heat of a Presidential campaign. The story’s essay style fits well on the internet." - Location ( talk) 20:11, 11 March 2023 (UTC)