Woof! Another watchdog for the watchdogs

This site is operated by the Center for Media and Public Affairs in Washington D.C., a foundation started five years ago by S. Robert Lichter and Linda Lichter. It bills itself as a nonprofit, nonpartisan "Consumer's Guide to the News."

"We all depend on the media for information, and we expect that information to be fair and accurate," the site's "About Us" section declares, "But sometimes, the mirror journalists hold up to the world can distort rather than reflect. Biases can slip out, inaccuracies slip in; context can be missing; and news can be overhyped, sensationalized, poorly explained or ignored."

NewsWatch offers post-mortems on a wide variety of stories, including the obsessions-of-the-moment like Elian and JFK Jr. It also offers interviews with prominent editors and writers. Among the current offerings is a conversation with E.R. Shipp, the Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist who's now doing a stint as The Washington Post's ombudsmen. The site has a hefty archive dating back to July of 1999, with a portion of it still under construction. Many of the stories focus on events the editors allege were misreported, half-reported or not reported at all. You'll also find a fairly extensive list of links to media criticism and journalism trade publications, including a few sites I haven't encountered elsewhere. If you want to join the action, you can send letters to NewsWatch, or you bark at the watchdogs directly. The "Talk to the Media" section of the site includes links to e-mail addresses and feedback forms for more than a dozen news organizations. I'd welcome comments from readers about this site or directions to others like it. Send me an e-mail or post your thoughts in the discussion area.

For an additional look at media criticism sites on the Web, visit this piece, "Liebling's heirs," from Suite101.com's archives: http://www.suite101.com/article.cfm/jour...

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