Media Criticism

In this Emmy Award-nominated film, top national political reporters admit mistakes in their reporting on the 2016 election campaign.

In this Emmy Award-nominated film, CEO Jeff Zucker acknowledges missteps in CNN’s 2016 campaign coverage, when many media outlets covered Donald Trump’s campaign as a spectacle.

This Emmy Award-nominated film looks at how the journalistic instinct for “balanced” reporting on Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump in 2016 played out.

This Emmy Award-nominated film explores tensions between the press and presidents, charges of liberal media bias and the decline in public trust in journalism. Watch the documentary.

Stella Liebeck was vilified when she was awarded millions after spilling McDonald’s coffee in her lap. Her complaint sounded frivolous. But the facts told another story.

Skepticism and fear surrounding vaccines were fed by a flawed study done in 1998 linking the MMR vaccine to autism. The study was quickly discredited, we’re still dealing with the repercussions.

The role-playing game ​D​ungeons ​&​ ​D​ragons​, once at the center of a moral panic, is now seen as a counterbalance to the problem of screen addiction.

Twenty years after Columbine, we examine the impact the attack has had on today’s youths – and how the media has more recently shifted its coverage of school shootings.

A rapidly growing California wildfire is threatening a grove of giant Sequoia trees in Yosemite National Park, some nearly 3,000 years old. For context, we examine the 1988 fires in Yellowstone National Park that ignited a debate over firefighting tactics and sustainable forestry.

In the digital age, where everyday people can suddenly become public enemy number one, how do we strike the balance between keeping free speech alive online and preventing a cyber mob from taking over?

The killing of twelve students and a teacher at Columbine High School in 1999 continues to shape how we view and understand school shootings today.

In the 1980s, many government officials, scientists, and journalists warned that the country would be plagued by a generation of “crack babies.” They were wrong. More than 25 years later, the media is sounding a similar alarm.

In 1982, an Australian mother was convicted of murdering her baby daughter. She was later exonerated, but soon fell victim to a joke that distracted the world from the real story.

The nightmare began in 1983 when a 39-year-old mother called the police department in Manhattan Beach, California and accused a teacher at the McMartin Preschool, Raymond Buckey, of molesting her two and a half-year old son.

The 1996 Olympics in Atlanta were rocked by a bomb that killed one and injured more than 100. In the rush to find the perpetrator, one man became a target. There was only one problem. He was innocent.

In the 1980s, images of tiny, jittery “crack babies” caused social outcry – crack-addicted pregnant mothers were prosecuted and the media warned that a generation of “crack babies” would plague our country. Turns out… they were wrong.