This week's issue of The New Yorker (though dated 2 April, it came out on 26 March) has a lengthy article looking at "the most powerful newspaper in Great Britain," the Daily Mail ("Mail Supremacy: The newspaper that rules Britain" by Lauren Collins); while the article is interesting in and of itself, it struck me for another, somewhat synchronous ( Read more... )

BBC Radio 4's Front Row programme -- an arts programme aired Mondays through Fridays from 1915 to 1945 GMT (that's 1515 to 1545 EDT) -- had a ten minute interview with Gore Vidal in its Friday, 23 May episode; the occasion was a rare (these days...) visit to London by Vidal and the recent publication in paperback in the UK of his latest (and, if ( Read more... )

Saw Good Night, and Good Luck, George Clooney's big wet one to the father of broadcast news as we (used to...) know it, Edward R. Murrow, last Friday, 21 October, one week after it opened in my exurban area.

( Contextual background and a review, with many links. )

Last Saturday, 3 September, doghousereilly linked to an article on BoingBoing which pointed out that an Army Times story published on 2 September referred to some of the survivors of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans as "insurgents" because they committed violence against the troops sent to aid and relocate them. Xeni Jardin, the technology correspondent for NPR ( Read more... )

There's an on-going mini-flap in the papers over the comments of Grammy-winning rapper Kanye West on the NBC television network's telethon for the survivors of Hurricane Katrina last Friday (2 September).

Seems Kanye West went just a bit off-script, to the visible discomfort of actor/comedian Mike Myers (the Austin Powers movies, Wayne's World, ( Read more... )

Since the U.S. media have been falling over themselves trying to bat clean-up on Vanity Fair's big scoop in its July 2005 issue, announced on Tuesday, 31 May -- that the one-time number two man at the FBI and heir-apparent to J. Edgar Hoover, W. Mark Felt, now an ailing 91-year-old, was "Deep Throat," the anonymous source that helped steer the ( Read more... )

I received the wrist-snappingly heavy March 2005 issue (No. 535) of Vanity Fair in the mail on Saturday, 12 February, and have only finished picking through it three or four days ago. This is the annual Hollywood Issue, which features a fold-out cover of the actors and actresses whom VF's editors deem to be the latest "hot properties;" this year ( Read more... )

National Public Radio's On the Media programme, originated at WNYC every Friday, had a pretty grim editorial from Bob Garfield in its 14 January 2005 show about the likely fate of investigative reporting in the wake of the house-cleaning undertaken by CBS due to the 60 Minutes piece, aired on Wednesday, 8 September 2004, about "Dubya's" National ( Read more... )

National Public Radio's On the Media programme of last Friday, 5 November, had two lengthy segments ("Deep Freeze" and "Lights Out") on the extreme secrecy that has marked "Dubya's" first term -- even before 9/11 -- and the unlikelihood that they're going to suddenly cease and desist in their unseemly zeal for overuse of the rubric "national ( Read more... )

Several years ago I read that the right wing in the U.S. was seeking revenge for Nixon; they didn't accept that "Tricky Dick" did anything wrong by having his crew of "plumbers," masterminded by former CIA operative and then-current thriller novelist E. Howard Hunt, bug the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate Hotel in ( Read more... )