Best journalist biographies according to redditors

We found 95 Reddit comments discussing the best journalist biographies. We ranked the 54 resulting products by number of redditors who mentioned them. Here are the top 20.

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Top Reddit comments about Journalist Biographies:

u/TriumphantTumbleweed · 50 pointsr/aww

My cousin traveled the world to compete in some of the crazier competitions. He is a tiny, tiny vegan man. He did sumo wrestling, arm wrestling, backward running, bull fighting, a hot sauna competition, and several others. He was considered the 3rd best arm wrestler in America with 0 wins, simply because he participated in the most official international competitions.

He wrote a book about it and it's amazing.

u/lookininward · 21 pointsr/TrueReddit

He wrote a book "Tokyo Vice: An American Reporter on the Police Beat in Japan". I read it a few weeks ago and was impressed. It shows how the yakuza, not one single entity but multiple groups that rise and fall, have an often symbiotic relationship with the government. It also answers a lot of questions about japanese sex culture and wider culture in general, the open side and the darker one where human sex trafficking can go uninvestigated.

u/Gizortnik · 21 pointsr/kotakuinaction2

Stalin's Apologist. The New York Times aggressively pushed Russian propaganda to cover up the Holodomor.

u/myheadhurtsalot · 16 pointsr/WTF

Hunter: The Strange and Savage Life of Hunter S. Thompson by E. Jean Carroll

Strange book, entertaining on certain levels, but mostly pandering bullshit.

u/spin0 · 11 pointsr/The_Donald

You would NEVER get a Pulitzer for exposing the DNC for what they are. Pulitzer is not about investigating and reporting the truth.

It's a leftist circle-jerk prize given to leftits.

I mean, they still havent cancelled the Pulitzer they gave to well-known commie liar for his fake news. Instead of cancelling it they still claim to be unaware that there was something incorrect in his lies (”there was not clear and convincing evidence of deliberate deception, the relevant standard in this case”). Which is no wonder considering the Pulitzer committee has long and deep ties to cultural marxism going back to 1930s.

Relevant history:

Walter Duranty, the Moscow Bureau Chief of The New York Times 1922–1936 and correspondent until 1941, won a Pulitzer prize for his series of articles about the Stalin's Soviet Union. It was fake news and propaganda published by the New York Times, a publication with a long documented history of publishing fake news.

Stalin's Apologist: Walter Duranty: The New York Times's Man in Moscow

To say that the NYT's reporting was misleading would be an understatement, they contained lies and propagandist apologism for Stalin's ruthless rule including persistent denial of famine and the mass starvation of Ukraine killing millions.

"There is no famine or actual starvation nor is there likely to be."
New York Times, Nov. 15, 1931

"Enemies and foreign critics can say what they please. Weaklings and despondents at home may groan under the burden, but the youth and strength of the Russian people is essentially at one with the Kremlin's program, believes it worthwhile and supports it, however hard be the sledding."
New York Times, December 9, 1932

And when some other papers reported about the starvation the NYT went and published shit like this:
"In the middle of the diplomatic duel between Great Britain and the Soviet Union over the accused British engineers, there appears from a British source a big scare story in the American press about famine in the Soviet Union, with 'thousands already dead and millions menaced by death from starvation."
New York Times, March 31, 1933

"Any report of a famine in Russia is today an exaggeration or malignant propaganda."
New York Times, August 23, 1933

New York Herald Tribune reporter Ralph Barnes asked Duranty what he was going to write about the famine. He replied: "Nothing. What are a few million dead Russians in a situation like this? Quite unimportant. This is just an incident in the sweeping historical changes here. I think the entire matter is exaggerated."

"You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs."
New York Times, May 14, 1933

The NYT's fake news were not without consequence, they were impactul not only on public but on policy makers too. In his groundbreaking history about Stalin's forced collectivization and mass starvation in Ukraine, Harvest of Sorrow, Robert Conquest concluded:

> As one of the best known correspondents in the world for one of the best known newspapers in the world, Mr. Duranty's denial that there was a famine was accepted as gospel. Thus Mr. Duranty gulled not only the readers of the New York Times but because of the newspaper's prestige, he influenced the thinking of countless thousands of other readers about the character of Josef Stalin and the Soviet regime. And he certainly influenced the newly-elected President Roosevelt to recognize the Soviet Union.


u/TommyTurtleGirl · 10 pointsr/TurtleBoySports

I think that is best explained by the creator himself. If you check out the description of his book in Amazon, it gives you some background.
https://www.amazon.com/Turtleboy-censorship-political-correctness-democracy-ebook/dp/B07K8CNVYT

u/[deleted] · 8 pointsr/japan

You can read the book instead. I enjoyed it.

Interview about it here.

u/QuasiQwazi · 7 pointsr/KotakuInAction

Good read on Amazon for only a buck about details of SJWs using all the familiar tactics to poison SciFi.

u/waterwazzoo · 7 pointsr/Ice_Poseidon
u/Jack-in-the-Green · 6 pointsr/metacanada

Well just take a look at some of their Pulitzer Prize award winning journalists...

https://www.amazon.ca/Stalins-Apologist-Walter-Duranty-Timess/dp/0195057007

u/sodiummuffin · 6 pointsr/KotakuInAction

I liked "How To Make a Social Justice Warrior" from sci-fi/fantasy author Will Shetterly. It's available free from Smashwords or Amazon.

It's mainly about SJW's attempts to take over the sci-fi community, which was one of the first communities they targeted, in addition to making a broader case against SJW/identitarian ideology as incompatible with genuine anti-racism/etc. Sometimes this means it ends up being about the minutia of internet arguments, but I always encourage people who encountered SJWs in one community to compare notes with the experiences of other communities. There's a ton of commonalities that are otherwise easy to write off as something to do with the specific community you're familiar with rather than with SJWs generally.

u/Seraphis_Set · 5 pointsr/TrueReddit

If you're interested in the Japanese Yakuza, I wholeheartedly recommend the book Tokyo Vice by Jake Adelstein (mentioned in this article).

It is simultaneously a credible assessment of the modern-day Yakuza's place in society (albiet from a westerner's perspective) and a very authentic memoir from a remarkable journalist. Also, I found it to be quite humorous and entertaining without that air of condescension that quite a few books on Japan tend to succumb to.

Probably one of the most enjoyable non-fiction pieces I've read in a while.

u/blobbohen · 5 pointsr/IAmA

What's his take on the incident reported by Jake Adlestein regarding Yamaguchi-guchi member Tadamasa Goto?

u/Nature_News · 5 pointsr/science

Oh, I wouldn’t get a PhD unless I really wanted to be a scientist! (That’s what I wanted to do when I started mine.) It’s a long, tough slog if you don’t intrinsically enjoy the work. I stuck it out to the end because I did enjoy some aspects of it and adored the people I worked with. But I suspect that if you want to be a science journalist, you probably already have enough of a science background to do a great job. (At least one of the best science reporters I’ve known had no science degree at all.) Just my opinion. Here’s a good blog post with more opinions. I also really like this book and this blog. -- Heidi

u/TwinPeaks2017 · 4 pointsr/politics

It's from this biography which I suppose fell under scrutiny for getting things wrong according to this article which reads like an opinion piece. I ought to have said "even considering that Thompson was homophobic to the level that he failed or refused to see his dying gay brother, the quote could have been satirical."

u/e1821e · 3 pointsr/europe

1200 out of 2656 is 45%. There are going to be external contractors as well. Yesterday I've read Malcolm Brabant's adventure. He was BBC's correspondent in Athens for many years, but not as a permanent employee. BBC has thousands of people working like that. Orchestras are not going to be touched. If you were familiar with orchestras you'd know that you can't reduce the number of e.g. violinists by 55%. It doesn't work that way. ERT is obviously bloated and we are all to blame. Not the way Pangalos means it. Don't defend the undefendable, it's like some people woke up one day and loved classical music. Please. It doesn't break your heart more than mine to see these women being caught in a shitty situation. I'm the first one that will sign any initiative to keep our orchestras alive, but I won't defend the excess numbers of so-called journalists.

u/gtt443 · 3 pointsr/KotakuInAction

You mean this one? I'll look it up.

u/crisperfest · 3 pointsr/exjw

As awful as the WT organization is, they're nowhere close to the kinds of truly awful fuckery that Scientology has engaged in. They don't just disfellowship people, they will attempt to ruin them utterly if they speak out against Scientology. This includes getting people fired from their jobs and framing them for crimes, even people who have never been a member.

You should read up about what Scientology did to Paulette Cooper and "Operation Snow White." Framing Paulette for a federal criminal offense and nearly driving her to suicide was just the tip of the iceberg. If you have Kindle Unlimited, I highly recommend Tony Ortega's book about Paulette titled "The Unbreakable Miss Lovely."

u/kitd · 2 pointsr/Rowing

Good stuff.

If you like that, you'll also like The Amateurs by David Halberstam and Assault on Lake Casitas by Brad Lewis

u/KlugerHans · 2 pointsr/Documentaries

"You just believe the rightie lies."

You get a Walter Duranty Award !

"The concern over Duranty's reporting on the famine in Soviet Ukraine led to a move to posthumously and symbolically strip him of his Pulitzer award he garnered in 1932, the year the famine started, although Pulitzer in question did not involve the famine. In response to Taylor's book, the Times assigned a member of its editorial board, Karl Meyer, to write a signed editorial regarding Duranty's work. In a scathing piece, Meyer said that Duranty's articles were "some of the worst reporting to appear in this newspaper." (from wiki)

http://www.amazon.com/Stalins-Apologist-Walter-Duranty-Timess/dp/0195057007

u/mnemosyne-0002 · 2 pointsr/KotakuInAction

Archives for the links in comments:

u/AlanCrowe · 2 pointsr/indepthstories

> For most of the 20th century, national news media had felt obliged to pursue and present some rough approximation of the truth rather than to promote a truth, let alone fictions. With the elimination of the Fairness Doctrine, a new American laissez-faire had been officially declared.

The story of Walter Duranty and the NYT is especially alarming because of suppression of other voices. George Orwell fought in the Spanish Civil War on the Republican side, but couldn't get his criticisms of the Stalinist a fair hearing in the UK. Malcolm Muggeridge managed to get uncensored reports of famine back to the UK in the diplomatic bag, where they languished.

> Before the web, it really wasn’t easy to stumble across false or crazy information convincingly passing itself off as true.

My mother used to believe her woman's magazines. I tried to explain that they are run on the cheap. The editor needs an article, perhaps ten ways to eliminate wrinkles, and a busy journalist makes shit up. Ta da! But she never got it. Written, printed, it was all true.

Actually it was much worse than that. The demonisation of dietary fat was based on slim, cherry picked evidence, but it was official - it was sometimes hard to discover an alternative to false or crazy information convincingly passing itself off as true.

I studied American History for O-level in 1976. What caused the Great Depression? As a school boy I had no access to alternatives to the "crisis of capitalism" narrative. Yet A Monetary History of the United States had been published 13 years earlier. The experts in government had screwed up, but in the 1970's the Zeitgeist favoured government experts, so the truth was slow to spread and weird shit such as "WWII revved up the economy and ended the Great Depression" was widely believed despite being bat-shit insane.

> But over the past few decades, a lot of the rabble they roused came to believe all the untruths. “The problem is that Republicans have purposefully torn down the validating institutions,” the political journalist Josh Barro, a Republican until 2016, wrote last year. “They have convinced voters that the media cannot be trusted; they have gotten them used to ignoring inconvenient facts about policy; and they have abolished standards of discourse.”

Having done some post-graduate research in statistics I'm aware of the replication crisis in psychology and medicine. The p-hacking scandal is part of it. The scientific journals are important validating institutions, but What has happened down here is the winds have changed When Susan T. Fiske doubled down on questionable research practices by condemning their critics as "methodological terrorists" she burned the credibility of the Association for Psychological Science to the ground. Republicans didn't do this. Academics did it to themselves.

"How America Went Haywire" is an interesting article because it fills in historical background going back to the 1960's. But much is missing. one example The Murray-GellMann amnesia effect. Another is the seminal work of Philip E. Tetlock.

Notice how the effects amplify each other. The mainstream media credulously report the mainstream experts. When the experts turns out to be wrong, ordinary folk know because, well, it gets a little subtle. The media report the news. Five years down the line the media are reporting more news, but they don't hold experts to account. The media don't say that old predictions are wrong, they print new predictions. Indeed they seduce the experts into making bold predictions; you need to be bold, to get published, and you can afford to be bold because you will not be held to account for you predictions.

Eventually ordinary people notice that things don't turn out the way they are supposed to and the credibility of both experts and media is lost. I'm not seeing Republican fingerprints on this.

u/turkturkelton · 2 pointsr/writing

I do some science writing in addition to academic scientific writing. The main part is to know what to leave out. Does it matter EXACTLY what experiments the researchers did? No. It matter's what they found (and that they actually found what they're saying they found).

Don't make long meandering sentences with a bunch of conjunctions and parenthetical phrases. Those are hard to read. Your readers are going to be reading very fast and if they get lost, they are going to stop and move on to something else. Don't lose your readers. You also have to know what they know. Can you just say polymers or do you have to explain what a polymer is? This is important.

Use active voice. None of that passive voice in science bullshit (unless that sentence calls for it). Use exciting verbs. Don't rely on a thesaurus. The reader will know.

If you like I'd be glad to read one of your pieces and give it a critique. Here are some good books to read if you're serious about getting into science writing.

Narrative Nonfiction--very popular now

Science Writer's Handbook

Fieldguide for science writing

Style book--not about science but needed for good writing, and it's funny

u/kcu51 · 2 pointsr/KotakuInAction

There's a free book about it, if that helps.

u/disputing_stomach · 2 pointsr/booksuggestions

David Halberstam has written some outstanding sports nonfiction books. Three of my favorites from him:


The Amatuers, about Olympic rowers


The Teammates, about four members of the Boston Red Sox who maintain lifelong friendships

The Breaks of the Game, a season embedded with the Portland Trail Blazers in 1979-80.

u/Afirana · 2 pointsr/Narnia

Sorry it took me so long to reply! I believe he mentioned not considering it an allegory in one of his letters to the children who read his books. There is a book that published those letters and it is worth the read.

u/BuleDKI · 2 pointsr/Journalism

I love this book, The Art of the Interview: Lessons from a Master of the Craft. The author has done long-form print interviews with reticent celebrities and details his questioning strategy.

PS Laddering is not just to discover a person's values IMHO

u/Al_Batross · 1 pointr/writing
u/ohstrangeone · 1 pointr/AskReddit
u/beardliness87 · 1 pointr/books

Here is the book you were referring to.

u/rocpic · 1 pointr/Rochester

Selling / giving away her book Broad, Casted on Amazon, apparently making political plans, and talking on the radio. I hope other politicians show up besides Rachel next November.

u/FreeMRausch · 1 pointr/politics

Stories like this and CNN blatantly calling someone a peaceful protester, who called for violence against innocent suburban citizens, is exactly why Trump has ammunition when he calls out fake news agencies on the left. Going all the way back to Walter Duranty, and how his work with the NY Times (which he won a Pulitzer Prize for) in the 1930s helped cover up the Soviet communist caused famine in the Ukraine, far too many news agencies on the left completely disregard journalistic ethics to push an agenda. They do the same stupid shit right wing outlets like Breitbart, Fox, and Hannity do but somehow, its wrong for many left minded people to call out CNN, The NY Times, etc due to some stupid idea of "whataboutism" when, in all honesty, lies and distortions should have no place in news what so ever on any side.


Article on CNN ignoring a protesters calls for violence against innocent suburban residents https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/davidmack/cnn-sorry-for-not-airing-full-clip-of-milwaukee-sister&ved=2ahUKEwj4nZzh1t_kAhWFg-AKHebMBVsQFjACegQIAxAB&usg=AOvVaw2PceVYxQadmUFb0u6bI0Ep&cshid=1568992052867

Book on Walter Duranty printed by the scholarly Oxford University Press that details his pro Stalinist work and violation of journalistic ethics regarding his coverage of the Soviet Union while employed by the NY Times https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://www.amazon.com/Stalins-Apologist-Walter-Duranty-Timess/dp/0195057007&ved=2ahUKEwj20dSe19_kAhXlRt8KHf6UC_gQFjAYegQIBxAB&usg=AOvVaw036zS9vCcfuDMzksnIkx_H&cshid=1568992175546

u/PateraXY · 1 pointr/booksuggestions

The Short Stories of John Cheever
Author: In case you couldn't guess, it's written John Cheever.
Description: If you've ever been interested in the vain, pointless, tortured people living in New England, this book is perfect for you. Equal parts sad and revelatory, it's as close to looking into a middle class nightmare as you're ever likely to see.
Link: http://www.amazon.com/The-Stories-John-Cheever/dp/0375724427

u/fastfinge · 1 pointr/Blind

I vaguely remember some blogging about this somewhere...a long time ago? Didn't know it would be turning into a book; interesting!

Unfortunately, the reviewer didn't include a link to where to actually buy the book; how odd! To save other people time, here's the Kindle version. I couldn't find it anywhere else, but Amazon's DRM isn't too terrible.

u/Llamatoe212 · 1 pointr/AskReddit

Pretty much anything by John Cheever. He has a book that is a compilation of his short stories but among the best ones are: Goodbye, my brother, the enormous radio and Christmas is a sad time of the year for the poor. I can't find a link to the actual story online but her is the book that ll those are in :http://www.amazon.com/Stories-John-Cheever/dp/0375724427/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1318502762&sr=8-1

u/crashsuit · 1 pointr/videos

Reminds me of this wonderful book, in which a guy places fourth out of four in his division at the US arm wrestling championship, and that's enough to get him onto the US national team. He does other things, too, like sumo wrestling and bullfighting.

u/Smegma_Torpedo · 0 pointsr/worldnews

I wrote that comment in a hurry, so I didn't any time to back my comment up. So here's a quote from Tokyo Vice: An American Reporter on the Police Beat in Japan :

> Hamaya's [a Japanese reporter] field of expertise was the mentally disabled, especially involving the appropriate measures to be taken with them when they broke the law. She was a also an enthusiastic advocate for the handicapped, an area where Japan is still decades behind the United States in terms of social intergration.
>
>The law and how it should deal with the mentally was being discussed heatedly in the late 1990's. Some people have loudly asserted that officers of the law should have stronger authority to forcibly incarcerate mental patients.
>p.207

I would like to go on to quote the book more, but I'm too damned lazy. Anyhow, this case and this case brought quite a bit of heat on the mentally handicapped and Japan and solidified a lot of prejudiced ideas the Japanese people held against the insane.