Media

"It's all about expectations," said Gregory Rodriguez, senior fellow at the New America Foundation, a nonpartisan think tank. "The fortunes of any given candidate really depend on our expectations of that person at any given moment and on the candidate's own rhetoric and sense of righteousness."

Glenn Beck is an American hero. Considered a buffoon at best by his liberal detractors, Beck is in fact a showman par excellence who draws on the passions of a small and alienated minority to create a television program that has done more to keep Americans safe than 10,000 public-service announcements. And for that, he deserves a medal from the Department of Homeland Security.

It is a tragedy when a perfectly good political sex scandal goes to waste. It’s especially tragic in Los Angeles, which famously lacks the kind of public narratives that dominate news cycles and force citizens to pay attention to their elected leaders.

Los Angeles’ latest missed opportunity arrived last week with the glorious news that Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, whose marriage broke up a few years back after an affair with a political reporter for a Spanish-language TV station, had been caught… more

Some people, like Columbia law professor Tim Wu, are tempted to think that even though Pirate Bay is still functioning, the conviction proves that as a business model, movie piracy is dead in the water. Last year's box-office figures went through the ...

Washington, DC – Senator Benjamin Cardin (D-MD) delivered the keynote address this morning at a New America Foundation/Washington Monthly event on the future of journalism and his sponsoring of the Newspaper Revitalization Act. Senator Cardin stressed that he in no way supports a "government bailout" of newspapers, and that his bill—which permits papers to convert themselves to tax-exempt, 501c3 organizations—would not significantly affect federal tax revenues. "Newspapers only pay taxes if they're making a profit," he noted.

New America's Director of Media and Communications, Troy K. Schneider, appeared on Wisconsin Public Radio's "Joy Cardin Show" to discuss the future of the news business and Sen. Ben Cardin's Newspaper Revitalization Act. The hour-long show, which can be downloaded or played below, followed New America's event with Sen. Cardin and a wide range of journalists and philanthropists explored the crisis facing journalism and its business models.

American journalism has entered a phase of what the economist Joseph Schumpeter called “creative destruction.” Gone are the fat profit margins that once underwrote investigative teams and deep, experienced teams of reporters to monitor and hold accountable both government and private power. New and exciting forms of journalism are sprouting, but new business models have yet to evolve to replace the old ones that are crumbling.

"American journalism has entered a phase of what the economist Joseph Schumpeter called 'creative destruction,'" said another witness, former Washington Post managing editor Steve Coll. "Unfortunately, at present, the rate of destruction of ...

The principle funding source for National Public Radio and PBS could be expanded to fill the gap from closing newspapers, argues Steve Coll, a former managing editor of the Washington Post. Congress should up the funding (Coll argues that Congress does ...

Sascha Meinrath, research director of the Wireless Future Program at the New America Foundation: