Joshua Benton

4 weeks ago | niemanlab.org | Joshua Benton

Robert W. McChesney, the lion of anti-corporate media scholarship, is dead at the age of 72. He was, for decades, probably the most prominent academic critic of American media from the left, focused on all the ways our idealized vision of a “free press” was actually hampered by the power of big business, the wealthy, and government. McChesney came from my favorite subgenre of media scholars: those who had a career in working journalism before entering the hallways of academe.

4 weeks ago | niemanlab.org | Joshua Benton

Journalism’s biggest scoops usually require months — years! — of shoe-leather reporting. Developing sources. Building trust. Coaxing out documents. Analyzing data. Assembling tiny fragments of information — perhaps insignificant on their own — into a damning portrait of malfeasance, graft, or abandonment of duty. But sometimes, you just get dropped into the wrong group text.

1 month ago | niemanlab.org | Joshua Benton

In 1964, Philip Converse published what would become one of the most cited papers in all of political science, “The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics.”1 It was a result of a movement at the University of Michigan, where Converse taught, to do large-scale data analyses of the ideology of the American public — or, perhaps more accurately, the lack thereof.

1 month ago | niemanlab.org | Joshua Benton

March 18, 2025, 2:17 p.m.Trump’s wholesale destruction of the information-generating sectors of the federal government will have implications that go far beyond .gov domains. The federal government does a lot of things. It lifts millions of seniors out of poverty! It forecasts avalanches! It invades foreign countries based on dubious intelligence! It determines what time it is! And when it’s got a spare moment, it protects the Constitution — or at least one copy of it.

1 month ago | pubs.usgs.gov | Joshua Benton |Daniel Doctor

Links More information: Publisher Index Page (via DOI) Download citation as: RIS | Dublin Core Study Area Publication type Article Publication Subtype Journal Article Title Dynamic baseflow storage estimates and the role of topography, geology and evapotranspiration on streamflow recession characteristics in the Neversink Reservoir Watershed, New York Series title Hydrological Processes DOI 10.1002/hyp.70106 Volume 39 Issue 3 Publication Date March 15, 2025 Year Published 2025 Language...