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The bulk of mainstream media in the U.S. is now owned by a handful of corporations that continue to gobble up smaller outlets and independent presses. Some say that we have created a perfect echo chamber and that the plurality of a free press is just a sad joke. Turning on the TV or scrolling through the headlines offers only the illusion of choice.

So is the media monopoly almost complete? Is there any cause for optimism in the new journalistic market place? In its pre-election coverage, does the national press corps reveal its true colors?

Cambridge Forum invited a panel of journalists and experts drawn from the Internet, academia, and NPR to discuss the state of journalism in America today.

Listen to Rotten Reportage – Part 1 recorded 3/09/2016

[audio:https://www.cambridgeforum.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/CAMFORUM-ROTTEN-1.mp3|titles=Cambridge Forum Rotten Reportage – Part 1]

Our speakers include Lonnie Isabel. Isabel teaches at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism. Isabel spent 25 years in the newspaper business, covering or directing the coverage of several presidential campaigns including the fabled 2000 election. He also ran the coverage of Hillary Clinton’s run for Senate, the impeachment of Bill Clinton, and just about every major national and international story of his generation. He has covered each national political convention since 1984.

Isabel has worked for Newsday, the Boston Globe, Boston Herald and Oakland Tribune. After leaving Newsday as deputy managing editor in 2005, Isabel joined the newly-created CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, where he started the International Reporting Program that has trained more than 75 journalists to cover international issues, and the International Journalist-in-Residence program that brings an endangered, targeted or threatened journalist each year to study and work at the school. He started at Columbia last year. He is co-author of a book to be released this summer, “Think/Point/Shoot: Media Ethics, Technology and Global Change”.

Peter S. Goodman is the Global Editor-In-Chief of the International Business Times, where he supervises more than 200 journalists across worldwide editions. He was previously Executive Business and Global News Editor for the Huffington Post, where he oversaw business, technology and international reporting while writing a column that earned a Loeb award for commentary. Goodman was the National Economic Correspondent for the New York Times during the Great Recession. There, he played a central role in “The Reckoning,” a series of stories on the roots of the 2008 financial crisis, which won a Loeb and was a finalist for the Pulitzer prize. Goodman is the author of Past Due: The End of Easy Money and the Renewal of the American Economy.

Sam Fleming is Director of News and Programming at WBUR. He’s responsible for supervising a staff of 75, including news managers, producers, reporters, writers, editors, hosts and production staff. Under his direction, WBUR’s News Department has garnered more than 50 national and local awards recognizing the quality and depth of its news coverage. Fleming first worked at the station in 1981 as a general assignment reporter. In 1992, he became WBUR’s News Director, a position he held until 2004. In that role he oversaw the breadth, depth and daily workings of the news produced at WBUR and helped to manage the content of daily broadcasts in their diverse forms.